quotations about abortion
Abortion exists as a comforting insurance policy against a disruptive teen pregnancy in the family. Or a career-interfering pregnancy. Or a late surprise pregnancy after the family had been completed (or so it was thought). Abortion serves convenience, or at least the avoidance of inconvenience. Abortion offers a quick, easy, largely safe way out of a messy situation. Few may acknowledge it outright, but abortion is there like a fire extinguisher, at hand should it be needed in an emergency.
DAVE NEESE
"The pro-abortion crowd is winning the fight", The Mercury, February 17, 2016
When a woman is facing an unplanned pregnancy, she is in shock. She wants to take an eraser and erase that life away. Abortion seems like it can erase it away, but it can't. What happens is in a moment of crisis, they feel like they can just take that eraser, but that didn't unmake a life.
JEANNE MANCINI
"The March for Life's New Message: 'Pro-Life is Pro-Woman'", Cosmopolitan, January 26, 2016
Reproductive justice isn't just about having the right to birth control or abortion, issues that many advocates prioritize. So many other factors determine what a woman's reproductive life looks like in practice, and not just in theory--like whether there are quality health care providers available in her community, whether she can get insurance coverage for those health services, and whether she lives in a supportive enough environment that she can bear the pregnancies she does choose to carry to term, and raise the children she chooses to raise, in safety and dignity.
EMILY CROCKETT
"Can you be a pro-life feminist?", Vox, January 22, 2017
For today, at least, the law of abortion stands undisturbed. For today, the women of this Nation still retain the liberty to control their destinies. But the signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows.
HARRY BLACKMUN
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989
Whether abortion is an expression of negative or positive conscience is a serious question with enormous consequences. If looked at from the point of view of the aborted fetus, it is an aggressive act of the strongest sort, causing its destruction. Considered from the side of the pregnant woman, it is simply not requiring her to carry her pregnancy to full term, in circumstances where in her opinion that would be inappropriate. However, the fact that the arguments can be made on both sides does not mean that the choice between them can be made arbitrarily by the toss of a coin or even that it is morally marginal. As I see it, the answer is based on the natural order itself. In this sense, what we have first to take into account is the fact that until viability the mother and fetus have to share the mother's body (using it in different ways). Most important is the fact that the only conscience is that of the mother. Since the freedom of this conscience is in question, the only viewpoint until viability can be that of this conscience, so that the issue is whether this conscience can be forced to act in a way contrary to its beliefs, viz., to continue a pregnancy which for perceived good reasons of conscience has become unwanted.
MARK MACGUIGAN
Abortion, Conscience, and Democracy
Even though in the U.S., abortion is a safe and legal option, conservative lawmakers in my state have made sure that among the hundreds of regulations restricting access to legal abortion, restricting the mere mention of it in public schools is up at the tippy top. Apparently, "abortion" is like talking about Jesus or the Buddha -- forbidden, as though it's a form of proselytizing, instead of a fundamental healthcare option. American teachers are required to teach about abortion like they're asked to teach about the fact that the U.S. was founded on genocide and slavery -- you know, as though all of it didn't even exist.
KATHI VALEII
"Why We Need To Include Abortion In Sex Ed", Ravishly, July 6, 2016
Our national institutions are braced for a seemingly endless clash of absolutes. The political stage is already dominated by the well-rehearsed and deeply felt arguments, on either side of the abortion issue, that we have come to know so well. The debate is unending. None of its participants ever seems even mildly persuaded by the arguments of the other side. As the apparently irresistible force of the pro-life movement bears down on the seemingly immovable object of abortion rights, local politics may at times be overwhelmed by the kind of single-issue campaigning that has already distorted the face of national elections. If this happens, the losers will be the democratic process and the American people.
LAURENCE H. TRIBE
Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes
Pro-choice supporters, feminists and generally good people everywhere are rejoicing a little extra today. Why? Because a UN committee declared abortion a human right.
BRENNA BAILEY
"It's About Time: UN Committee Says Abortion is a Human Right", Brenna Bailey, February 3, 2016
Abortion is widely if tacitly regarded as a way of minimizing the troublesome riffraff of society.
DAVE NEESE
"The pro-abortion crowd is winning the fight", The Mercury, February 17, 2016
Abortion is the atrocity of our age, and like most atrocities the horror of it is excused and ignored for the sake of the "good" it is supposed to procure--a good, I might add, that has yet to materialize. We are not more welcoming, children are not better cared for, marriages are not saved, rape and sexual exploitation not eliminated.
KATE COUSINO
"An Irrational Faith in Abortion", Patheos, January 22, 2017
The grisly clinical details of abortion would seem to put the Pro-Choice camp at a public-relation disadvantage. Likewise, the trickiness of making the case that abortion doesn't involve the snuffing out of life, especially in the mid or later stages of pregnancy. Yet despite such PR and political disadvantages, Pro-Choice prevails in legal and political arenas across the land.
DAVE NEESE
"The pro-abortion crowd is winning the fight", The Mercury, February 17, 2016
We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like. A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won't be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing.
EMILY LETTS
"Why I Filmed My Abortion", Cosmopolitan, May 5, 2014
I think abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare. And I have spent many years now, as a private citizen, as first lady, and now as senator, trying to make it rare, trying to create the conditions where women had other choices. I have supported adoption, foster care. I helped to create the campaign against teenage pregnancy, which fulfilled our original goal 10 years ago of reducing teenage pregnancies by about a third. And I am committed to do even more.
HILLARY CLINTON
Democratic Compassion Forum at Messiah College, April 13, 2008
That's not to say that the experiences of women who feel pain and regret after choosing an abortion ought to be discounted. Women aren't given enough opportunities to talk about that experience outside the pro-life movement, which is invested in promoting the idea that post-abortion psychological stress is an unavoidable consequence of the procedure. And since the pro-choice movement is invested in highlighting the opposite (which is largely true), it means that we never hear the stories of women who regret their abortions but remain pro-choice. Those women exist. And women on both sides of the issue would benefit from greater access to mental healthcare and nonjudgmental public forums for working through their experiences.
AMANDA HESS
"Regretting an Abortion Doesn't Make You Pro-Life", Slate, July 12, 2013
How tragic that it's Christians -- the very people who are most likely to claim to be pro-life -- who wind up being responsible for the majority of abortions! Those who aren't having abortions themselves are all too often among those making unwed pregnancy look like an option worse than abortion! They think they're condoning premarital sex but in reality, the loudest message they're sending young women is "if you get pregnant you really have no choice but abortion, unless you want to be shamed and ruined!"
KRISTINE KRUSZELNICKI
"Punishing a Student for Pregnancy Promotes Abortion", Pro-Life Humanists, May 21, 2017
It would certainly be possible ... to argue that the destruction of a being evolving towards humanization is less morally wrong than the destruction of an already fully human being, but I cannot see that the difference in moral culpability would be a large one, given the fact that this zygote-embryo-fetus is the only possibility of existence for a human being-to-be. The human person that would have been but for the abortion would now never be. If respect for human life is a part of our moral code, therefore, I do not see how the destruction of such a potential human being could ever be less than seriously wrong, even if it were a lesser fault than the killing of an admittedly human person.
MARK MACGUIGAN
Abortion, Conscience, and Democracy
It is fashionable, or at least usual, that when in the first few months of a pregnancy doctors do studies to see if the child is healthy or has something, the first idea is: "Let's send it away." We do the same as the Nazis to maintain the purity of the race, but with white gloves on.
POPE FRANCIS
USA Today, June 16, 2018
People in the pro-choice movement want women considering abortion to believe that the most difficult part of their choice will be the step through the door of the abortion clinic. For women like my mother, far more difficult was the step out the door--and every step after that for the next 20 years.
PRISCA LECROY
"My Mother Regretted Her Abortion", The Atlantic, July 11, 2013
My abortion story is absolutely uneventful. It has left no scars. But in this current political climate, one in which a woman who makes the responsible choice of not bringing an unwanted child into this world is forced to drive 500 miles or is violently harassed on her way to the clinic door or is pushed to take matters into her own hands, this uneventful-ness seems downright miraculous. May it always be so uneventful. May abortion once again be accepted for what it always has been: a necessary component of responsible family planning.
AMY BRENNEMAN
"Amy Brenneman: Why I'm Sharing My Abortion Story", Cosmopolitan, February 29, 2016
I was 16 years old.
I was given a new name and then I was drugged. I didn't like the IV. My dad held my hand but I started to get really fidgety. They upped my drug dosage and wheeled me away. I was so cold, so they gave me a blanket. I counted backwards from 100 ... 99 ... 98 ...
The end.
The end of my first baby's life.
SARAH MAE
"My Abortion"