Alain Badiou never wrote a treatise on abortion, yet his philosophy provides an illuminating framework for thinking about it. His ideas — truth as universal, the subject as a fidelity to an event, and the communist hypothesis as the name for equality — together offer a striking defense of reproductive freedom. In his view, moral value does not arise from divine command, cultural tradition, or personal preference, but from participation in a truth that has universal meaning. On those terms, the defense of abortion becomes not a question of private “choice,” but of fidelity to a universal truth of equality and emancipation.

For Badiou, ethics begins not with prohibitions or outcomes but with truth-procedures — processes through which new possibilities for thought and action emerge. In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1993), he argues that a truth is not a relative opinion or moral rule. It is something that breaks into a given situation — an event — and reveals a new universality. When someone remains faithful to that event, insisting on its truth despite opposition, they become a subject.

Truths appear in four domains: art, science, politics, and love. In each, fidelity to the event opens a space where something universally human can take form. The abolition of slavery, the scientific revolution, the emergence of modern art — each was an event that reconfigured what it meant to be human. Ethics, in this sense, is not about obeying laws but about sustaining fidelity to these universal truths once they appear.

From this angle, the question of abortion cannot be reduced to competing interests — the “rights” of the fetus versus the rights of the mother — nor to utilitarian calculations of happiness or pain. The moral question becomes: what truth does this act sustain? Does it affirm a universal process of emancipation, or does it reinforce domination and inequality?

The twentieth century witnessed an enormous event in the Badiouian sense: the entrance of women into full social, political, and intellectual subjectivity. This was not a gradual reform but a rupture in the “state of the situation,” which for centuries had confined women to reproductive and domestic functions. The truth that emerged from that event was simple but revolutionary: women are full subjects of truth, capable of thought, fidelity, and universal participation.

To deny........

© Blitz