Abortion Quotes

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
― Ronald Reagan

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette?”
― George Carlin

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
― Mother Theresa of Calcutta

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

“I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is a war against the child... A direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself... And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love... And we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts...”
― Mother Teresa

“It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
― Margaret Sanger

“We don't like to kill our unborn; we need them to grow up and fight our wars.”
― Marilyn Manson

“The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor

“In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.”
― Thomas L. Friedman

“If a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me - there is nothing between.”
― Mother Teresa

“The biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are “those people.” The truth is…we are the others. Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being “those people”–the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our kids play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door.”
― Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't): Making the Journey from "What Will People Think?" to "I Am Enough"

“Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
― Sarah Palin

“Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.”
― Faye Wattleton

“My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.”
― Camille Paglia

“[I]t seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

“In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative

“Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Your religion should help you make the decision if you find yourself in that situation, but the policy should exist for you to have the right to make it in the first place.

When you say you can't do something because your religion forbids it, that's a good thing. When you say I can't do something because YOUR religion forbids it, that's a problem.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“If we lived in a culture that valued women's autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot.”
― Christiane Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing

“The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.”
― A.E. Samaan

“If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Radical Muslims fly planes into buildings. Radical Christians kill abortion doctors. Radical Atheists write books.”
― Hemant Mehta

“Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.

If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our
teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.

The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.

A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The fight over abortion asks whether a fetus or embryo should be in the circle or not, and the animal rights debate asks the same about animals.

When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself. The center of the circle shifts as its perimeter is changed. The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.

Empathy Inflation and Metaphysical Ambiguity

Are there any legitimate reasons not to expand the circle as much as possible?

There are.

To expand the circle indefinitely can lead to oppression, because the rights of potential entities (as perceived by only some people) can conflict with the rights of indisputably real people. An obvious example of this is found in the abortion debate. If outlawing abortions did not involve commandeering control of the bodies of other people (pregnant women, in this case), then there wouldn't be much controversy. We would find an easy accommodation.

Empathy inflation can also lead to the lesser, but still substantial, evils of incompetence, trivialization, dishonesty, and narcissism. You cannot live, for example, without killing bacteria. Wouldn't you be projecting your own fantasies on single-cell organisms that would be indifferent to them at best? Doesn't it really become about you instead of the cause at that point?”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Adoption was such a positive alternative to abortion, a way to save one life and brighten two more: those of the adoptive parents.”
― George W. Bush, Decision Points

“In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.”
― David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.

“Feminists have accepted that choice is possible when it comes to a different, difficult subject: abortion. The feminist position (and I agree with it) is that women own their bodies and therefore each woman has the right to choose to get an abortion if she gets pregnant. This is called being "pro-choice". Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It's her body; it's her right.”
― Chester Brown, Paying for It