Abortion Rights Traceable To Marquis de Sade — The concept of “my body, my choice” is literally traceable to the Marquis de Sade, maybe history’s greatest misogynist. He wrote in his 1797 novel Juliette:
With regard to the father, he is in no wise concerned with whatever issue may occur, if issue there should be. And, with the assumption that women are held in common, which is what they should be and had better be soon, what concern could he conceivably have? He spits a little sperm into a receptacle everyone else relieves himself into, a womb where what can germinate does germinate; how is this gesture to turn into the grave obligation to look after a fertilized egg? No, he has no more duties to observe toward a foetus than he would toward something deposited by an insect and which some shit he dropped at the foot bf a tree caused to hatch several days later; in both cases I have cited, the problem is simply one of some matter of which a man needs to get rid and which subsequently becomes whatever it happens to become. The embryo is to be considered the woman’s exclusive property; as the sole owner of this fruit rather jestingly called precious, she can dispose of it as she likes. She can destroy it in the depths of her womb if it proves a nuisance to her. Or after it ripens and is born, if she is for any reason displeased with it or irked at having produced it, she can destroy it then; whatever the circumstances, infanticide is her sacred right. Her spawn is hers, entirely hers, and no one else can claim this bit of property belonging to no one else, utterly useless to Nature, and hence the mother may feed it or she may strangle it, depending upon her preference.
Abortion Rights Traceable To Marquis de Sade
