Alain Badiou, truth, and the moral permissibility of abortion

In Logics of Worlds (2006), Badiou turns to how truths appear within the world - how they become visible. Every world, he writes, is structured by a system of "counting" - what is recognized and what is excluded. Truths emerge when something previously uncounted becomes visible, when a new form of being-there demands recognition.

Women's reproductive autonomy has historically been just such an uncounted truth. The patriarchal world "counts" life in terms of property, lineage, and control, but not in terms of subjective equality. The legalization and moral defense of abortion force this uncounted reality - women as autonomous subjects of the universal - into appearance. Abortion, therefore, is not merely a private act; it is part of a broader truth-procedure by which equality becomes visible in the world.

When laws or doctrines restrict abortion, they reassert the old "count" - they restore the world's hierarchy by rendering the woman invisible again, as if she were not a thinking subject but a vessel. To defend abortion is to refuse that erasure, to affirm the truth of equality against the world's inertia.

It's important to stress that for Badiou, moral permissibility does not stem from freedom of choice in the liberal sense. Choice, in his view, belongs to the sphere of the consumer, the market, the individual negotiating among options. Fidelity is something else: the steadfast commitment to a universal process even when it is difficult.

A woman who chooses abortion in fidelity to her equality - in rejection of coercion, shame, or structural domination - acts ethically because she acts in truth. The permissibility of abortion therefore lies not in subjective preference but in whether the act sustains fidelity to the event of emancipation. In contexts where abortion is restricted, stigmatized, or criminalized, the decision to defend or pursue it becomes precisely such an act of fidelity: it resists the forces that would close off the possibility of equality.

From a Badiouian perspective, the politics of abortion belongs to the larger question of how universal truths become embodied. The body is not merely biological; it is a site of appearance where universality takes form. When women assert sovereignty over their reproductive bodies, they are not making a "private" demand but insisting that the universal extend to them fully. Their bodies become the site where equality is tested and affirmed.

That is why Badiou's communism of the future - the "one world" in which no one is excluded - must include reproductive freedom as part of its universal project. To deny it would be to maintain an inequality at the level of being itself: some bodies counted, others not.

A Badiouian ethics of abortion is not sentimental or permissive; it is austere and principled. It does not ground morality in empathy or rights, but in fidelity to the truth of equality. The defense of abortion is morally permissible because it continues the emancipatory event that declares women equal subjects in the universal. To oppose it is to betray that event - to side with the inertia of the world against the transformative power of truth.

Badiou reminds us that ethics, properly understood, is the courage to "continue" - to persist in truth when the world demands obedience. The politics of the body, and of abortion in particular, is one of the most enduring sites where this courage must be enacted. The question, finally, is not whether abortion is right or wrong in itself, but whether the defense of reproductive freedom remains faithful to the universal principle that animates every true politics: that no human being is subordinate to another, and that equality - like truth - is always worth continuing.