Across the West, politicians are panicking about falling birth rates. Women’s reproductive choices are suddenly treated as a matter of national emergency. Yet the debate keeps circling the wrong question.
At nineteen, reading Sartre’s The Age of Reason, I identified not with the pregnant woman waiting for an abortion, but with the man trying to raise the money for it in a desperate attempt to keep hold of his freedom. The stance the thirty-four-year-old Mathieu took towards life was the stance I cherished: refusing commitment; floating above the stickiness of obligations and entanglements; stepping over the heap of one’s clothes each morning as if they were the dry skins of yesterday’s life – a chance of reinvention, constantly. I wanted Mathieu’s freedom — the ability to keep all doors open, to refuse irreversible commitments, to live as pure possibility, more than I feared the pregnant Marcelle’s vulnerability. In my nineteen-year-old imagination — and in Sartre’s — her body harboured a parasitic life form that would suck all her energy from her. Sartre’s image of the “great pink vase” thrilled me. I did not want to be hollow, receptive, waiting to be filled. I wanted to be the one who moved.
To me, freedom was not only the sparkling trajectory I felt about to begin at the summer’s end when I went to university; it was the escape velocity that social mobility required. I was leaving behind the no-hope housing estate I had been raised on; the psychic stuckness I saw in my disabled father — unable to work, passing every interview but failing every medical — and in my mother, annexed by mother-love. At university, freedom was speed and flight: I walked fast, read for hours without interruption, stayed up all night discussing philosophical conundrums, silly with self-importance, intoxicated by the idea of a life with no limits. In my second year, a girl I knew only distantly — we shared the occasional greeting across the quad — fell pregnant and dropped out to marry her boyfriend and raise the child. My friends and I were horrified: through pregnancy it was as if she had fallen out of the sky, and we could not decide if we felt more pity or revulsion for her choice.
What I didn’t grasp then is that when motherhood becomes coded as loss of altitude, that symbolism doesn’t remain private. It surfaces later as public panic: fertility, decline, what women owe the future.
Only much later, reading Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others — published the same year as Sartre’s novel, and likewise centring abortion, although in Beauvoir’s text it is the female protagonist, Héléne, who is keen to terminate her pregnancy — did I realise what I had refused to see. In Beauvoir’s novel, abortion reminds us that in women, but not men, freedom has to be won by reckoning with the body, not in transcending it — not because the body determines who we can be, but because it is part of the terrain on which freedom is negotiated. If I had read this at my College, I would have recoiled from this truth, even as I recoiled from my fellow student who had opted to keep her baby. Women could live like Mathieu, I believed wholeheartedly; thanks to feminism, as well as the pill, they did not have to suffer such encumbrances and limitations as were once provided by biology. These, I thought, could be well and truly left behind, like tuberculosis, and smog.
I was wrong. Whatever technology promises freedom, it is necessarily different in a body that gestates.
Reading these two novels together recently was a revelation. These novels were written in 1945, before contraception was even legal in many countries, before formal equality, and yet the same tension persists across time. Our abortion debates today circle rights and wrongs, healthcare and morality, and latterly the spectre of demographic doom, but rarely ask what model of freedom they presuppose. Abortion is simply the most compressed site of a deeper dilemma: what does freedom mean in a body that can nurture life?
The reality is that liberal feminism took Sartre’s approach to freedom — the idea of transcending every limit, including the body — rather than Beauvoir’s understanding that freedom, for women, must be won through the body, not despite it. We are still living with the consequences.
Looking back, I can see how my identification with a Mathieu-like freedom shaped not just my view of pregnancy and motherhood, but my entire relation to work and identity. I had lived either by holding back, presenting a facade while my true, “authentic” self hid deep within, or else by throwing myself fully into every aspect of the job, every day, every evening, every weekend, as if I was trying to immerse myself in my professional identity, like someone in a winter coat jumping into a cold river. I inhabited neither position comfortably. It took years to reach an accommodation with the other things in my life beyond work: being a daughter, a partner, a carer — without feeling that coexistence with obligation was a betrayal of some purer self underneath.
Thinking now about the student who got pregnant does not mean I have changed my mind: I still see her choice to drop out as a mistake. But it wasn’t simply that pregnancy spelled failure for a nineteen-year-old. For me, there was never a time when motherhood felt “right”; it was forever cast as regressive, a return to Mathieu’s image of the woman’s body as an empty vase waiting to be filled. When the choice appeared, it wasn’t a neutral fork. It was already morally loaded. I didn’t choose against motherhood at some clear crossroads. I inhabited a world in which it had already been coded as dropping out. If it was ever presented as a future possibility, it flickered there like a mirage, beautiful and distant, never coming closer or solidifying into something real.
After a PhD supervision with my (male) supervisor, when I was 26, he took me for lunch and talked about his children. Maybe there was something in my face but suddenly he put down his fork and said to me: “Don’t miss out on having a child.” He added: “It’s an interesting anthropological experience.” I nodded; he knew that this angle would awaken my curiosity. And yet I could see quite clearly that it was him with the fascinating career, the adventure of fieldwork in remote places, not her, who stayed at home with the kids.
Then one Saturday morning in my forties I was sitting on a stool in the window in Starbucks leisurely reading, when a harassed-looking woman took the stool next to me for a fraught cup of coffee with her two little girls. Amidst correcting them, breaking up a sudden argument, trying to smooth their hair, she told me she was taking them to the theatre to see a ballet but wished — how she wished! — she were sitting quietly reading a book like me. As she left she gave me one last backward glance, her face almost tragic, as if I embodied a life she had forfeited.
What she did not see was what I was reading. Elizabeth Wurtzel had just published her piece in Vice about how keeping every door open — living as pure possibility, which for her included an abortion — had left her alone, and conscious that, as she approached 50, another door had quietly closed. Wurtzel’s freedom had been incandescent: all-night intensity, huge book advances spent as quickly as they were earned, adventures with men and with life — but also, now, no flat to anchor her, no institutional structure to hold her, no family of her own. This model of experience resonates with the one that Beauvoir had aspired to, when she wrote in her memoirs that she had wanted to “embrace all experience and bear witness concerning it.” For her, as for Wurtzel, and for me too, if I’m honest, “all experience” meant intensity, travel, sexual and intellectual adventure, but it did not include motherhood. That omission was not incidental. And unfortunately, that model of freedom — brilliant, resistant to containment — stretches differently across a woman’s life than it does across a man’s. What looks like heroic refusal at twenty can become thin air at fifty. The freedom I appeared to inhabit was not uncomplicated; the life that allowed me to read uninterrupted in my forties carried its own sense of loss and longing. As they left the café, I too stared after them wistfully, at the little girls with their plaits and Peppa Pig lunchboxes each holding one of her hands.
The tension I absorbed at nineteen has not disappeared. It reappears every time feminism debates abortion, reproduction, or equality. Answers in contemporary feminism moreover are only ever partial, whether sanctifying biological limits, trying to abolish them, along with the structures of the economy and society as we now know them, or suggesting that they have already been solved, and where women drop out — of University, or work, of the promotion game — reframing it cheerfully as preference.
But none of these responses — surrendering to that tension, abolishing it, or pretending it is already solved — answer the question I faced at nineteen: what does freedom mean in a body that can bear children?
Feminism transformed women’s lives. But it carried forward a conception of freedom shaped by male embodiment, and that inheritance still constrains us. Feminism opened doors. It did not change the architecture of the house.
The tension between transcendence and embodiment is not a policy failure, nor a moral mistake. It is the condition of freedom itself. Each woman encounters it in her own time and under her own circumstances, often with shock, as if she cannot believe this knot has not yet been unpicked. When I was a manager, we offered a generous maternity leave package — six months on full pay and a further six at reduced pay — but women would nevertheless come into my office, at the end of this, anxious and depressed from the isolation and loneliness of being at home all day with a small baby. Or they would explain, spluttering through tears of outrage and bitter disappointment, why they hadn’t met their deadline, because their ex-partner, usually another academic, usually ahead of them in the promotion game, didn’t pick up the children for the weekend as he had promised. No lip service to work-life balance can unpick this. The shock is at least partly because feminism borrowed Mathieu’s model of freedom as transcendence and assumed it could be ported into a woman’s body without remainder. Pregnancy and motherhood show this to be untrue; they reveal that our institutions were built around a male life course and have only partially adapted to female embodiment.
A feminism based more on Beauvoir’s understanding of freedom, than Sartre’s vision, would neither masculinise women nor romanticise motherhood. It would acknowledge asymmetry without individualising its costs, and trust women enough to face that reality without illusion. It would stop promising escape and start telling the truth: defending the right to end a pregnancy not as escape from embodiment, but as protection against unjust conditions, and for those who choose motherhood, insisting that the costs of reproduction be redistributed rather than privatised.
The failure — by society, by contemporary feminism too — to acknowledge that modern liberal freedom was built around male embodiment in practice means that women have been sold a version of it that cannot be fully delivered. The result is that women are blamed — for not reproducing, for needing an abortion, or else for “leaning out” — when the real failure is a civilisation that still treats gestation and motherhood as a private inconvenience.
And yet, if I’m going to be honest, I don’t yet know what a form of freedom looks like that fully integrates female embodiment without relegating women to second-tier status. All I know is that men can become fathers without bodily takeover, hormonal upheaval, or being identified primarily as “fathers”. Women cannot. They risk annexation — metabolic, temporal, economic, psychic.
Perhaps I have stopped, finally, trying to pretend I was Mathieu.
At nineteen, I wanted to keep all doors open. What I have learnt is that some doors close because embodiment is real. Others close because institutions are lazy. And some can be kept open — but not by women alone.
