Catholic prohibition of abortion

The Catholic prohibition of abortion is presented as a doctrine whose appeal to the sanctity of fetal life becomes, in practice, a demand that women bear the consequences of pregnancy even at grave risk to themselves. Simone de Beauvoir tests its stated moral logic against the Church’s acceptance of other forms of killing and against the contradiction between treating the fetus as separate from the mother and treating it as part of her body when motherhood is being praised.

The doctrine and its moral rationale

The argument against legal abortion rests, Beauvoir writes, on an old Catholic claim: the fetus has a soul, and without baptism it cannot enter paradise. This claim makes abortion appear to be an absolute moral wrong, but the chapter questions why that reasoning should apply so inflexibly to the fetus when the Church accepts the killing of adult men in war or under the death penalty. In those cases, the Church leaves the soul’s fate to God’s grace; Beauvoir asks why the same trust could not apply to an embryonic soul.

The comparison is sharpened by other examples of death outside the doctrine’s strict protection. During the holy wars, unbaptized people were massacred; victims of the Inquisition, executed criminals, and soldiers killed in battle could likewise die without assurance of salvation. Beauvoir uses these contrasts to challenge the claim that opposition to abortion follows a consistently applied principle of humanitarian concern for every soul.

Contradictions in the treatment of the fetus and mother

Beauvoir identifies a second inconsistency in the language used to define the fetus. Doctors opposing abortion may declare that it is an autonomous being and does not belong to the mother. Yet those who exalt motherhood also insist that the fetus is part of the mother’s body, not a parasite sustained at her expense. The two descriptions serve different arguments: separation is invoked to deny the mother’s authority over pregnancy, while bodily unity is invoked to idealize maternity.

The practical stakes become stark in the position of Dr. Roy, whose 1943 book was dedicated to Pétain. Roy called for abortion to be treated as a crime rather than a misdemeanor and opposed even therapeutic abortion when the mother’s life or health was in danger. Although he acknowledged the choice between two lives, he advised sacrificing the mother. Beauvoir presents this recommendation as an instance of paternalistic reasoning that grants the fetus autonomous status while refusing the pregnant woman a comparable claim to survival and health.

Repression and its consequences

The prohibition does not achieve its stated demographic purpose. Beauvoir notes that opponents and supporters of legal abortion alike could recognize the failure of repression. Estimates cited in the discussion put the annual number of abortions at about 500,000 around 1933, one million in a 1938 estimate, and between 800,000 and one million in 1941; she regards the last range as closest to the truth.

A 1948 report by Dr. Desplas describes the gap between criminal enforcement and the scale of abortion in the Seine district. In 1943, 1,300 investigations produced 750 charges; 360 women were arrested, and 513 people were sentenced to prison terms of one to five years, while the estimated number of abortions in the district was 15,000. Beauvoir uses these figures to show that punishment could reach women and practitioners without eliminating the practice. The law, in her account, exposes women to illness, sterility, and death while proving powerless to ensure more births.

Historical and political significance

The critique belongs to Beauvoir’s broader account of how religious and legal authorities have helped make women’s subordinate position appear divinely ordained. She argues that religions shaped by men drew on stories such as those of Eve and Pandora, while philosophy and theology were also recruited to justify women’s subordination. The abortion debate thus appears not as an isolated dispute about doctrine but as one point where religious claims, law, and control over women’s lives converge.

Beauvoir’s analysis also treats the prohibition as part of a continuing antifeminism: the fervor with which some men reject measures that could liberate women reveals, she argues, an interest beyond abstract concern for fetal life. Her conclusion is not that the doctrine’s religious premises can be settled by statistics alone. Rather, she sets those premises beside their selective application, their consequences for women, and their failure as a policy of birth increase, making the doctrine’s moral authority itself the subject of scrutiny.