Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational treatise on gender inequality, “The Second Sex,” was published in France in 1949, a year after the author—a thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual—was allowed to vote for the first time. French women, so belatedly enfranchised, would not have access to legal birth control until 1967, or to legal first-trimester abortions until 1975.

In 1971, Beauvoir took the lead in her countrywomen’s struggle for reproductive rights. She wrote a declaration, “The Manifesto of 343,” that exposed her and her fellow-signers—some of France’s leading female artists, actors, writers, jurists, and filmmakers—to criminal prosecution. (It also exposed them to degrading ridicule of a now-familiar sort. Forty years before Rush Limbaugh aired his repulsive fantasies about Sandra Fluke, the declaration was nicknamed “The Manifesto of the 343 Sluts.”)

“One million women in France have an abortion every year,” Beauvoir’s declaration began. “Condemned to secrecy, they have them in dangerous conditions…. These women are veiled in silence. I declare that I am one of them. I have had an abortion.”

Not all of the women who signed Beauvoir’s manifesto had actually had an abortion. Some of them, like Violette Leduc, the lesbian writer, may never have had sex with a man. The point was to stand together on behalf of the “veiled.” And in 1971, I was one of the veiled. I was a single woman just out of college, far from home, living marginally, without a partner, who found herself pregnant.

It is sometimes hard to remember that abortion has not been a crime in the United States since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. If politicians like Todd Akin and Paul Ryan prevail, it will be a crime again, under all circumstances, along with some forms of contraception that can spare women from a hard choice that they have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of their lives.

Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about “legitimate rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on the trauma of rape and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely limited mental capacity who are conned by predators, or on patients who have been told by their physicians that a full-term pregnancy may kill them. Forcing such women to bear a child violates their integrity in a barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.

But most women who seek abortions do not fall into those categories. They are our neighbors, daughters, sisters, granddaughters, and colleagues. They come in every size and color. They are rich and poor. They are Republicans and Democrats. They are churchgoers and atheists. They are married, single, and divorced. Some ardently want a family—when the time is right. Some of them have children already. But they have this in common: at some point between the onset of puberty and the end of menopause—and one neither wants nor needs to know the circumstances, it is none of our business—they had a sexual encounter that resulted in an accidental conception, and they couldn’t go through with it.

Here is where the Akin uproar leads us to perilous ground. “Legitimate rape” (or “forcible rape,” as the Congressman put it in his apology for having “misspoke”) is a coded expression that everyone in its target audience understands. It conjures the image of a Victorian maiden ravished by a villain in a cloak and a top hat, twirling his mustache as she flails on the railroad tracks. It implies that there are “legitimate” victims—and only certifiably “pure” women fall into that category. Everyone else had it coming.

“The Second Sex” is an exhaustive study of the ways that misogyny has, from time immemorial, been disguised as righteousness. Todd Akin and Paul Ryan want to write a new chapter to the story. If you are saved, you need not fear their policies. If you are fallen, you will pay the price. They would lower the veil of shame and silence on a new generation. But if we let this become a debate about female virtue, rather than about female self-determination, we have lost it.

Illustration by Richard McGuire.