Male moral hypocrisy over abortion is borne physically by women

Evidence

Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution; they can contradict themselves with dizzying cynicism; but woman feels the contradictions in her wounded flesh; she is generally too shy to deliberately revolt against masculine bad faith; while seeing herself as a victim of an injustice that decrees her to be a criminal in spite of herself, she still feels dirtied and humiliated; it is she who embodies man’s fault in a concrete and immediate form, in herself; he commits the fault, but unloads it onto her; he just says words in a pleading, threatening, reasonable, or furious tone: he forgets them quickly; it is she who translates these phrases into pain and blood. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1432

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi) as applied to the gendered abortion situation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the man’s words are ‘translated into pain and blood’ by the woman—abstract male principle becoming embodied female suffering—is a dense, memorable formulation of the existentialist idea that men live transcendence while women are stuck in immanence of the body.
• XREF: connects to: Abortion law’s moral horror is hypocritical condemnation that endangers women — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1416; Illegality transforms the physical anguish of abortion into moral punishment for women — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1430; Beliefs that childbirth pain awakens maternal instinct express male resistance to easing women’s burdens (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Illegality transforms the physical anguish of abortion into moral punishment for women #expands (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1430
• Beliefs that childbirth pain awakens maternal instinct express male resistance to easing women’s burdens #qualifies (0.80)