Bangladesh, Nov. 20 -- 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 t...