Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best.

Today begins episode three of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and I'm joined again by my fabulous reading partner, Fiza Parvis.

Hi, Fiza. Hi, Amy, excited to be back.

It's so great to see you again, and I'm excited to dive in. If you've been listening through the first and second episodes, we've tackled a few different chapters of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece, The Second Sex. We've talked about various chapters and compared them to other texts and talked about existentialism and kind of drawn out some issues that we've encountered in our own lives.

And today is going to be our final episode on this.

So FISA is going to talk about a chapter that's titled The Mother and a chapter called Woman's Situation and Character.

So Fiza, if you want to take it away with the chapter, the mother.

Yes, she begins this chapter by talking about abortion, right? And you would think that's,

you know, exactly the opposite of motherhood, right? And not wanting to be a mom. And I was just like,

why does she, you know, begin this way? And for a few times, it actually put me off.

And then I sort of understood, you know, why she begins where she does. And sort of she's trying to not, you know, she doesn't really give a Christian or any, you know, sort of point of view about this, but she's talking about how the women,

woman is perceived in our world. Like, she is particularly perceived as a tool to bring about

children. And her own health is not really considered at all, you know, in such cases. So more

importance is given to the child, to this unborn child, rather than the woman.

And that was really, you know, once I understood it from that point of view, it was really

revealing to me. So in her case, Bovar's case, she's talking about the woman and she's making

the case for the woman and saying that, you know, we should actually consider, you know,

whether what the woman feels in this instance and should care about her health. And this is why I think

she begins with abortion. And another thing she really, you know, points out is the hypocrisy of the

male. And so, yeah, so she says that this is a quote from her,

like men universally forbid abortion, but they accept it individually as a convenient solution.

They can contradict themselves with dizzying cynicism. So, you know, she is seeing this and

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