Freedom’s responsibility falls on the self alone despite one’s un-chosen birth.

Evidence

WE have a past. Of course we have been able to establish that this past does not determine our acts as a prior phenomenon determines a consequent phenomenon; we have shown that the past is without force to constitute the present and to sketch out the future. Nevertheless the fact remains that the freedom which escapes toward the future can not give itself any past it likes according to its fancy; there are even more compelling reasons for the fact that it can not produce itself without a past. It has to be its own past, and this past is irremediable. … If the past does not determine our actions, at least it is such that we can not take a new decision except in terms of it. … Thus the importance of the past can not be exaggerated since for me “Wesen ist was gewesen ist,” essence is what has been. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1177 (#expands, via linked claim)

But this is only an illusion. Because she does not really make the child: it is made in her; her flesh only engenders flesh: she is incapable of founding an existence that will have to found itself; creations that spring from freedom posit the object as a value and endow it with a necessity: in the maternal breast, the child is unjustified, it is still only a gratuitous proliferation, a raw fact whose contingence is symmetrical with that of death. The mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other—who tomorrow is going to be—his own raisons d’être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1450 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I choose myself perpetually and can never be merely by virtue of having-been-chosen; otherwise I should fall into the pure and simple existence of the in-itself. The necessity of perpetually choosing myself is one with the pursued-pursuit which I am. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1147 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Giving birth cannot confer existential meaning because freedom must found itself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1450; Freedom cannot choose its own past but must exist through it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1177; Freedom requires a perpetual renewal of self-choice without any support — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1147 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Freedom cannot choose its own past but must exist through it. #expands (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1177
• Giving birth cannot confer existential meaning because freedom must found itself. #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1450
• Freedom requires a perpetual renewal of self-choice without any support #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1147