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Abortion
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“We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.”
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“I am not for abortion; nobody is for abortion. I am for your right to make your own hard choices in this world.”
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“Anybody who's against birth control and abortion has to be a criminal idiot.”
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“In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).”
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“Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.”
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“Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know, it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.”
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“I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.”
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“Call the police to Bessie, get her jailed? Queenie would find someone else to do what she wanted done, for it was clear she was determined to be rid of her progeny. If there was one fact becoming ever more clear to him it was that the Queenies of London, like the Pearls, would go to any lengths to rid themselves of the punishment their sex heaped on them. Abandoned by men who shared the culpability of their dilemma, there was no other answer for them but to find someone like Bessie Woodstock to 'take care of them,' a dreadful euphemism that filled his mind with a sick depair.”
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“Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get ...”
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“Historically the opposition to abortion and birth control ... stemmed from the urgency of the need to decrease the mortality and morbidity rates and to increase the population ... in the matter of abortion the human rights of the mother with her family must take precedence over the survival of a few weeks' old foetus without sense or sensibility.”
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“... I was and am, like many women, both pro-life and pro-choice.”
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“Coat hanger: Symbol of pro-choice movement, inspired by the drastic measures taken by women desperate to obtain an abortion.”
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“I don't think abortion is the problem. Unwanted pregnancies are the problem.”
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“... I belong to that enormous group, very likely a majority, in fact, who are both pro-choice and anti-abortion.”
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“There is only one reason I've ever heard for having an abortion: the desire to be a good mother.”
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“Like coronary artery surgery, an abortion is a response to things gone wrong. It is not the underlying disease. Ignoring the disease is bad medicine.”
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“The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.”
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“... one hundred percent of the bishops who oppose the repeal of anti-abortion laws are men and one hundred percent of the people who have abortions are women.”
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“In front of the clinic, holding the bullhorn, was a thin hyperthyroid man. ... His supporters included a number of college-age young men, all fervently committed to carrying their own pregnancies to term, and a variety of middle-aged women, whose faces seemed to say: My life was made miserable by maternity, and so should everyone else's be.”
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“No one likes abortions. Our ultimate ideal is a health care system so evolved and a society so enlightened that abortions are prevented. But abortion will not go away until birth control always works, sex is always consensual, and human beings never make mistakes.”
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“nobody really wants to get up on that table! / nobody really wants to kill a part of themselves. / nobody wants to meet their ancestors with blood on / their hands / but when a woman knows she cant / handle bringing new life into fullness / she more than / has the right, to beg that life's forgiveness / and send it back to the spirit world.”
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“they say the wrath of God will visit anyone who has / an abortion/but i got news for them — most women / punish themselves more severely than God ever cld / or wld and any God that cant forgive, needs to / be replaced.”
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“There is tremendous sadness, loneliness, in the cry, 'A woman's right to choose.' No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg. Abortion is a tragic attempt to escape a desperate situation by an act of violence and self-loss.”
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“Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.”
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“No woman ever had an abortion because it was a right. No one ever came into my office saying, 'Yay! I get to exercise my right today.'”
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“Abortion does not belong in the Constitution, presidential politics, or back alleys.”
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“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
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“The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it.”
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“Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!”