Abstract

Drawing from the children’s thoughts about the question how the babies are made, Freud realized that the existence and function of the semen remains beyond the child’s grasp and is eventually substituted with a narrative like: the husband feeds his wife an egg, and she hatches it out in her body. As the child grows up and gets educated, these early sexual theories are usually overcome and forgotten. However, psychoanalysis reveals that for various reasons such thinking may be repressed and persist. In this case, the infantile sexual theory lives on as an unconscious conviction that informs the adult’s thinking despite his better knowledge of the processes of conception. For five decades the US abortion right opponents have poured much effort and resources into their heated battles, and even after they won in court they keep on and on. The passion of their fight may reveal an old infantile idea, springing from male grandiosity, namely that he is the one who has the baby, and the mother just the oven to hatch it out. Rather than progressing towards tolerance of dissent, respect and care for the other and striving to win her over in order to conceive something new, the anal attack wants to do away with such otherness and liberty