Motherhood Quote by Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci aims a grenade at the polite fiction that history is an impersonal force. By yoking geopolitics to the most intimate, bodily decision imaginable, she collapses the distance between “great men” history and private life, forcing the reader to feel how one person can tilt the century. The line is engineered for maximum offense: it doesn’t merely condemn Khomeini’s theocratic revolution, it retroactively denies him the right to have existed. That extremity is the point. Fallaci’s journalism often treated speech as a weapon, and here the weapon is taboo.

The subtext is as sharp as it is unsettling: if the Islamic Republic’s rise is the defining trauma, then incremental critique isn’t adequate; only annihilating hyperbole matches the scale of harm she attributes to him. It’s also a power move. By invoking abortion, she drags her opponent into Western culture-war terrain, recasting a political adversary as a monstrous error that should have been “corrected” before birth. The cruelty becomes a claim to moral clarity.

Context matters. Fallaci built her fame on war reporting and confrontational interviews; after Iran’s 1979 revolution and especially in her post-9/11 writing, she framed political Islam as an existential threat to liberal Europe. This quote belongs to that late-Fallaci posture: defiantly anti-sentimental, furious at what she saw as Western self-deception. It “works” rhetorically because it dares the reader to either recoil or join her in rejecting civility as complicity. The cost is obvious: it turns political critique into dehumanization, and in doing so, it reveals as much about Fallaci’s appetite for rhetorical violence as about Khomeini’s legacy.