Giving birth cannot confer existential meaning because freedom must found itself.

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes biological propagation (immanence) from free existential creation (transcendence) — core Beauvoirian apparatus.
• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s nothingness/freedom and the contrast between quasi-object creation and genuine founding. — connects to: Freedom’s responsibility falls on the self alone despite one’s un-chosen birth.; Freedom cannot choose itself and thus creates things and situation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1205; Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1328 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Appealing to transcendent values secretly denies one’s own freedom as the source of normativity. #corroborates (0.90) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 198
• Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1328
• Freedom chooses its being but cannot choose not to be #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1146
• Freedom is the capacity to begin, which logic cannot compel. #corroborates (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072
• Freedom is a factual necessity, not an essence we can know #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1074
• Truths that compel assent cannot sustain a freedom-based movement. #contradicts (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 178
• Freedom arises when necessity manifests its inner identity, not by its removal #expands (0.75)
• Objective possibility constitutes freedom but requires knowing and wanting #qualifies (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1285