Simone de beauvoir quotes motherhood

Abortion's Mother: Early Works of Simone de Beauvoir

Germain Kopaczynski, O.F.M.Conv.

Simone de Beauvoir's first novel, , has as its epigraph Hegel's comment: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other."1 The fundamental hostility of human beings toward each other remains constant in Beauvoir's works all her life long.

In a sense, her whole literary output as well as her life can be regarded as a long, running commentary upon epigraph. In the French feminist's stance on the practice of human abortion, we witness the same clashing of human consciousnesses ending in death:

The immorality of women, favorite theme of misogynists, is not to be wondered at; how could they fail to feel an inner mistrust of the presumptuous principles that men publicly proclaim and secretly disregard?

They learn to believe no longer in what men say when they exalt woman or when they exalt man; the one thing they are sure of is this rifled