Badinter takes feminist torch
from of de Beauvoir
The right of life and death over the child
frees women to resemble men, she says

Simone de Beauvoir passed away on April 14, 1986, eight hours short of the anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre's death on April 15 six years earlier. She was 86. At her funeral, the words of Elisabeth Badinter were repeated by many who were present: "Women, you owe everything to her!" These emotionally charged words title the last chapter of Deirdre Bair's biography of de Beauvoir. They symbolize the linking of one generation of secular feminists to the next. Badinter, born in 1944, holds a doctorate in philosophy and teaches at the Ecole Polytechnique. She established herself as a literary force with her book, The Myth of Motherhood. Badinter has pledged to carry the torch that de Beauvoir enkindled in The Second Sex.

Like de Beauvoir, Badinter, the wife of France's former minister of justice (under Mitterand), emphasizes the freedom, individualism, and transcendence of the woman. She warns of the suffocating potentialities inherent in marriage and pregnancy, dismisses God as irrelevant, and excoriates the patriarchy.

Badinter's philosophy, as a whole, however, differs significantly from de Beauvoir's on three fundamental points. Badinter substitutes "evolutionary optimism" for de Beauvoir's "historical pessimism." She replaces her mentor's notion of the "opposition" between the sexes with that of "resemblance." And finally, Badinter extends de Beauvoir's notion of existential individualism much further by absolutizing the ego. Taken together, these three points outline a view that has a decisively futuristic quality, and one that has clear affinities with science fiction. She envisions the unfettered egos of men and women, no longer hampered by gender distinctions, building a future of liberty and peace. Abortion and contraception are taken for granted, but they initiate a series of reproductive technologies that allow for extra-corporeal gestation and male pregnancy.

Badinter senses a major upheaval going on in the world. She claims, though in the complete absence of any proof, that "the present evolution of the relationship between the sexes seems to us to be so considerable that we are tempted to see it as the beginning of a genuine mutation, a cultural mutation which does not merely upset the power relationship between men and women, but which obliges us to rethink the 'nature' of them both." She confidently looks to the "Utopia of the future" as a fortification against "the pessimism of history." Badinter places her faith in time and in science. The Good Book, she tells us, cannot help us. During "this great upheaval" of our present moment in history, "the Good Book, for once, does not contain the answers to the new questions!" Science, through contraception and abortion, has liberated women from reproductive servitude, she says. As a consequence, women are no longer subservient to men. Patriarchy is dead, and the complementarity model of the sexes is now recognized as archaic.

According to Badinter, history has shown that whenever the notion of the "complementarity of the sexes" has been put into practice, the inevitable result was a sexual asymmetry in which men dominated women.

Complementarity, she says, equals inequality, and inequality always leads to domination and oppression. Badinter routinely uses the term "complementarity" as if it means conflict.

She never treats the term according to its real meaning. She does not consider, for example, that the concept of marriage as a "two-in-one flesh" unity between man and woman, as recorded in the first Book of Genesis, is both non-exploitive and mutually fulfilling.

For Badinter, the broad acceptance of contraception and abortion has allowed women to become emancipated from their biology. Such a freedom, she writes, shatters the "millennarian equation 'woman = mother'." Now that she has "the right of life and death over the child," she is no longer subservient to the child or the child's father. Badinter embraces the new ethic, according to which "the woman's rights come before those of the fetus and before her duties as a mother. The 20th century has decided that an existent individual takes priority over a potential human being. Motherhood is no longer sacred, and woman has finally become a simple human being."

One might question the moral authority that an age, "the 20th century," might possess to decree this new ethic. "God," she contends, "is no longer to be reckoned with in the West." Moreover, the "simple human being," stripped of a bodily nature and of relationships with other human beings, is hardly more than an abstraction. There are not "simple" human beings. Human beings are embodied, engendered, biologized, unique, and unrepeatable. Nonetheless, Badinter sees contraception and abortion as freeing women from their bodily natures so that they can more closely "resemble" men. In addition, the development of an incubator that would gestate a child for nine months would greatly add to her female liberation. In this way, the incubator would serve as "an artificial mother for an embryo fertilized in-vitro."

With the dissolution of nature, gender distinctiveness, and biological relationships, Badinter is well on her way to absolutizing the ego. After all her deconstructing, the only reality left standing in any substantial way is the ego.

Badinter does not flinch from the end result of her negative methodology. "Self-love has become a code of ethics," she tells us. "The categorical imperative no longer sets out the conditions of the relationship between ego and other people, but those of my relationship with myself. It orders me to love myself, 'to develop myself, to enjoy myself'. The aim of the moral code has shifted away from the other and on to oneself."

Badinter repudiates the Christian notion of neighbour, as well as the Kantian notion of duty to others. "By dint of proclaiming our duty toward our personal development," she argues, "the idea of sacrifice now only appears under its negative aspect of self-mutilation."

Altruism, including motherly and fatherly relationships with children, are acceptable only to the extent that they serve the ego's aims. A mother's child, for example, exists to satisfy her narcissism. But, "with more than two children, the parents feel the burden is too heavy, the sacrifice of their egos too great." She claims that "to leave some of our potentialities undeveloped is an unforgivable crime against the new capitalism of the ego." Is it necessary to explain that no one has either time or opportunity to develop all of one's potentialities? Or is it necessary to point out that there are certain potentialities that we cannot develop without the co-operation of other people? Badinter's egoism invites no end of irresolvable conflict. A world of six billion self-absorbed egos would be unimaginably chaotic.

She accepts abortion unquestioningly, regarding it as a necessary step in the evolution of human beings. After all, "the life of a complete human being was more important that of a potential human being," she states. She forgets, however, that there are no "complete" human beings. Even if there were, it would be unlikely that such "complete" beings would condone the killing of the less complete members of their human family. People, at best, are always improving, but they never reach completion.