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Sourced

A

• "Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State."
  • Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please (1988)

• "We all knew that we were flaunting the law but doing it in the safest way from prosecution that we could. . . Before Roe v. Wade, I had no guilt feelings about what I was doing. I was proud of being able to help the women that I was taking care of."
  • Dr. Thomas Allen, discussing illegal abortions he performed, Voices of Choice [1], 2005

• "A description of the partial-birth abortion is the single greatest argument against its continued existence... When a practitioner uses sharp scissors to stab a hole in the skull of a baby and vacuum out its brain contents and calls it a medical procedure, words have indeed lost their meaning... With regard to infanticide, no one looking at this procedure could disagree; it is one-fifth abortion, four-fifths infanticide. It kills a child when 80 percent of his or her body is out of the womb... If partial-birth abortions remain legal, if Congress allows them to continue, what next? Killing a child who has emerged from the womb 3 or 4 more inches... Opponents of this bill keep asking whether it would be the first step in an effort to ban all abortions, but the real question is whether allowing this procedure is not a step toward legalized infanticide."
  • Helen Alvare, representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 11/17/1995

• "Every person has the right to have his life respected. This right shall be protected by law and, in general, from the moment of conception. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."
  • American Convention on Human Rights, Article 4, 1969, ratified by 25 member-states of the Organization of American States

• "Doing it with a priest never got me off, they wash it so often! But doing it with Jesus, now that is something else! Most Christian women would be trained to think that even this thought is blasphemous. But I say that's a load of bollix! That's how women are paralyzed, disconnected from the source of their own power, by religion. . .I may have felt guilty at the thought of wanting to do it with Jesus but then I say why not?. . .And if we, as women, don't rebel against the way in which the Church and State have conspired to control our sexuality we'll never reach a point of self-evolvement. And evolution, in any sense, has nothing to do with enforcing guilt. . .Jesus Christ has nothing to do with that and it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and don't let anyone tell me that it has. . .It has nothing to do with a core concept of Christianity. . .And it has nothing at all to do with the children, in the broadest sense. If it does why don't those people go down to the back-streets of Dublin where children really need their help. Or go down to Colombia where children live in sewers? There are millions of children who need help. So this is the greatest abuse of the words 'pro-life', they are not for life. This is about control of a woman's sexuality because they can't stand the idea that we are saying we are not just incubators anymore. And we're not even going to pretend that we are. We're not breeding farms. Many men, even some women, might like to think we are. But their misguided, misdirected energy is probably based more on their own guilt. Yet when somebody tries to have that kind of control over another person's conscience, we're talking about concentration camps here. There's no greater enslavement. So anyone who looks at that position closely must see it's not about the children at all, and it's more often anti-life than pro-life.
  • Tori Amos, American singer-songwriter and musician, Hot Press magazine, Ireland, (1992)

• "Supporters of [the Human Life Amendment] are often eloquent in their defense of the fertilized egg but are seldom willing to aid the woman whose body nourishes it."
  • Carole Anderson and Lee Campbell with Mary Anne Cohen, reprinted in The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, Boston Women's Health Book Collective (1984)

• "[Doing abortions] can make you feel bad ... No matter how pro-choice you are, it makes you feel low."
  • Anonymous abortion doctor, quoted by Jack Hitt in "Who Will Do Abortions Here?", New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998 [2][3]

• "I guess I never realized I would find [performing abortions] as unpleasant as I do. I really don't enjoy it at all. It's not a rewarding thing to do ... [patients] look at you as an evil person who is deliberately putting them through a painful procedure ... it's their whole attitude that bothers me. I feel like a simple thank you is in order, instead of 'Why are you doing this to me?'"
  • Anonymous abortion doctor, quoted by Jack Hitt in "Who Will Do Abortions Here?", New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998 [4][5]

• "[Abortion is] the dirty work of our field. The sad truth is that the people who moonlight at the clinics are grade-B doctors. They're not the cream of the crop."
  • Anonymous pro-choice OB/GYN, quoted by Jack Hitt in "Who Will Do Abortions Here?", New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998 [6][7]

• "[I am ] angry at the woman ... I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the [head of the fetus], for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby."
  • Anonymous abortion doctor, quoted by Jack Hitt in "Who Will Do Abortions Here?", New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998 [8][9]

• "All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy. . . Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed [abortion]. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!"
  • Susan B. Anthony, women's suffrage movement leader, The Revolution, 7/8/1869.

• "We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil [abortion]...It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from the dreadful deed."
  • Susan B. Anthony, women's suffrage movement leader, The Revolution 7/8/1869

B

• "We do not call police ourselves during a hit. Our best work is done before police arrive, or when there are not enough police there to prevent us from doing what we have to do. Get in place before cops can mess with it; establish balance of power early, do key acts requiring physical contact with OR [Operation Rescue] as much as possible before cops have enough people to intervene. Even if the sidewalk is 'public,' we've had success at putting enough of us out, early enough, to basically bully the ORs into staying across the street. . . Chivalry is not dead with these people (just convoluted), and that means they have an inordinate sense of modesty and 'honor' about being accused of touching women. There are innumerable instances of clinic defenders neutralizing male ORs [Operation Rescue activists] by shouting 'get your hands off me, don't you dare touch me' all the while they are tugging or pushing OR out of the line."
  • Bay Area Committee Against Operation Rescue (BACAOR), in its activist guide Manual for [Abortion] Clinic Defense [10] [11]

• "[I]n face of erroneous interpretations of freedom, [Pope John Paul II] emphasized in an unequivocal way the inviolability of the human being, the inviolability of human life from its conception until natural death. The freedom to kill is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery."
  • Pope Benedict XVI, homily, 5/7/2005

• "When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged."
  • Mattie Brinkerhoff, women's suffrage movement leader, in The Revolution, September 2, 1869

• "Men tend to take abortion lightly; they. . . fail to realize the values involved. The woman who has recourse to abortion is disowning feminine values, her values. . . Women learn to believe no longer in what men say. . . the one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there."
  • Simone de Beauvoir, feminist leader and advocate of legalized abortion, in The Second Sex, 1952

• "[T]he word 'person', as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn."
• "The states are not free, under the guise of protecting maternal health or potential life, to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies."
• "This right of privacy…is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."
• "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."
  • Justice Harry Blackmun, U.S. Supreme Court, author of majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, 1/22/1973

• "I’m shunned by the gay community because I’m not the right kind of gay. I’m rejected by the feminist establishment for the same reasons. . . There is no room for dissent on the left. The moment you give into their framework, you surrender your individualism. . . Abortion is a failure of the feminist establishment. With every kind of birth control available in the world, abortion is not something to be proud of. If you need an abortion, you’ve failed."
  • Tammy Bruce, former member of NOW's national board of directors, to Columbia University students as quoted by Dan Healey in "Conservativism and Feminism Combined - Tammy Bruce, an Openly Gay, Pro-Choice, Pro-Clinton, Pro-Bush Conservative, Defies Labels", Columbia Spectator, 4/6/2005 [12]

• "The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact."
  • Julie Burchill, British feminist and abortion advocate, in Damaged Gods, 1986

• "Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. . . Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination. . . Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over ["My abortions! All five of them."] I had a choice, and I chose life - mine."
  • Julie Burchill, British feminist and abortion advocate, from "Abortion: still a dirty word" in The Guardian, 5/25/2005 [13]

• ". . . the vast majority of physicians observe the standards of their profession [when performing abortions], and act only on the basis of carefully deliberated medical judgments relating to life and health."
• ". . . plainly, the Court today rejects any claim that the Constitution requires abortions on demand".
  • Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, U.S. Supreme Court, incorrectly assessing the eventual legal interpretation of the ruling and development of abortion-on-demand, from his concurring opinion in Roe v. Wade, 1/22/1973

• "I think a noble goal for this country is that every child, born and unborn, ought to be protected in law and welcomed into life."
  • George W. Bush, U.S. Presidential debate in Boston, 10/1/2000

• "We must appreciate the dignity of life in all its seasons, even the path of the elderly in the twilight of their years, to work toward the day when every child, born and unborn, is welcomed to life and protected by law."
  • George W. Bush, to the Catholic Press Association Convention, 5/26/2000

• "Last year Cardinal O'Connor said, 'It is my very sincere prayer that if I live for a week, if I live for twenty years, my last breath will be in support for the sacredness of every human life.' As a country, we too, must keep our pledge to the first guarantee of the Declaration of Independence."
  • George W. Bush, to the Catholic Press Association Convention, 5/26/2000

• "Those of us who are pro-choice are also, passionately, pro-life. Most of us love babies, love children, and love our liberty—not to mention loving sex and our right to have it when, how, and with whomever we choose."
  • Rachel Kramer Bussel, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck", Village Voice, January 13, 2006

• "I'm pro-choice because I couldn't fully enjoy sex were I consumed with worry about the potential consequences. I'm pro-choice for all my friends who've had abortions and gone on to do great things, who are better women for being childless (for now). I'm pro-choice for the new moms and dads I know who were able to actively choose to become parents. I'm pro-choice for all those babies... born knowing they're 100 percent loved and wanted."
  • Rachel Kramer Bussel, "I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck", Village Voice, January 13, 2006

C

• "They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation. . . I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine. . . If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks.”
  • Dr. Stuart Campbell, former professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at London's St. George’s hospital commenting on the government's Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH) report that 50 babies a year are born alive in the UK after botched National Health Service abortions, as reported by London's The Sunday Times, November 27, 2005 [14]

• "I think the fear in the [abortion rights] movement is if we admit abortion is hard for some women, then we're admitting that it's wrong, which is totally not the case. I've heard from women who are having problems dealing with their abortion who are still ardently pro-choice."
  • Rosemary Candelario, director of Massachusetts Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, September 2001

• 300 Dollars that's the price of living what? / Mommy I don't like this clinic / Hopefully you'll make the right decision / And don't go through with the Knife incision
  • Nick Cannon, hip hop artist and comedian, describing his mother's choice not to abort him, in Can I Live?, 2005

• "I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound. . . I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don't die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will. . . My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy."
  • Dr. LeRoy Carhart, testifying under oath in 1997 about what he does to facilitate abortion, Asheville Tribune

• "I am LeRoy H. Carhart, and I am an abortionist. . . We're not asking for the right to suck the brains out of every child that walks down the street, we need to continue to offer safe abortions to women who need them to be done."
  • Dr. LeRoy Carhart, addressing the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Omaha World-Herald, 1/2001

• Q: Are you currently a member of the Board of Directors for Physicians for Choice, Physicians for Reproductive Health and Choice?
• Carhart: Exactly. I am
• Q: And are you also on the National Board of Directors of the Religious Coalition of Reproductive Choice?
• Carhart: Yes, ma'am. I am
• Q: Doctor, are you board certified?
• Carhart: No, ma'am. I'm not.
  • Dr. Leroy Carhart, confirming his pro-choice credentials under oath, Carhart v. Ashcroft, 4/1/2004

• "This act covers every D&E [dilation and evacuation] that I did. Everything that I do to cause an abortion is an overt act. . . The fetuses are alive at the time of delivery. [There is a heartbeat] very frequently."
  • Dr. LeRoy Carhart, testifying under oath that language in the partial-birth abortion ban act bans more than just partial-birth abortion, Carhart v. Ashcroft, 4/1/2004

• "Well, I was telling Ms. Smith at lunch today that, you know, we are talking about a fetus that's not only been dead for 48 hours, but we are talking about a fetus that has been dead for 48 hours in essentially a warming oven or crockpot. It has been kept at a hundred degrees for 48 hours, and if, you know, that's enough, that's enough temperature to cook meat, so we are not only dealing with a fetus that has been dead in my practice, we are dealing with a fetus that's both dead and soft, so it's much more pliable."
  • Dr. Leroy Carhart, testifying under oath on the safety of his abortion methods, in a deposition taken for Carhart v. Ashcroft, 4/1/2004

• "Prior to 1973 - just think about this for a minute - the laws of America reflected an overwhelming pro-life consensus that children before birth deserve the protection of the law. That consensus was a secular consensus. Those laws were not written by clerics, or in monasteries, or by the great organized religions of America. . . Not unique to our left or to the right, Democrats or Republicans, Liberals or conservatives, it represented the mainstream of America. My friends, it still is the mainstream of America, so don't be fooled. . . The American people have not accepted abortion on demand. . . We cannot become comfortable with it, because it's fundamentally contrary to what we believe as Americans. . . Every poll shows a vast and growing unease with the abortion license and the industry that serves it. I believe a pro-life consensus already exists in America. And it grows every time someone looks in a sonogram."
  • Robert Casey, prominent Democrat and former governor of Pennsylvnia, addressing students at Notre Dame University, 1995

• "If you haven't seen what abortion does, then you will never understand what abortion actually is."
  • Pastor Clenard Howard Childress, Jr., Life Education And Resource Network

• "Abortion is the greatest deception that has plagued the black church since Lucifer himself."
• "Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks were lynched in the U.S. That number is surpassed in less than 3 days by abortion.
• "1,452 African-American children are killed each day by the heinous act of abortion.
• "3 out of 5 pregnant African-American women will abort their child.
• "Since 1973 there has been over 13 million Black children killed and their precious mothers victimized by the U.S. abortion.
  • Pastor Clenard Howard Childress, Jr., Life Education And Resource Network

• "I am opposed to abortion and to government funding of abortions. We should not spend state funds on abortions because so many people believe abortion is wrong."
  • Bill Clinton, now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to Arkansas Right to Life, 9/26/1986

• "How is the person who considers abortion to be murder any different from the Pole who knew what was going to happen at Auschwitz? If the Pole was morally obligated to attempt to save lives, isn’t the person who opposes abortion under the same obligation?"
  • B.D. Colen, The Anti-Abortion High Ground

• "If Americans support abortion, let's vote. . . Just this past term, in Stenberg vs. Carhart, the court expanded the apocryphal abortion right to an all-new right to stick a fork in the head of a half-born baby."
  • Ann Coulter, lawyer and political commentator , syndicated column, 12/28/2000

• "Taxes are like abortion, and not just because both are grotesque procedures supported by Democrats. You're for them or against them. Taxes go up or down; government raises taxes or lowers them. But Democrats will not let the words abortion or tax hikes pass their lips."
  • Ann Coulter, lawyer and political commentator, syndicated column, 2/21/2002

• "Liberals' only remaining big issue is abortion because of their beloved sexual revolution. That's their cause: Spreading anarchy and polymorphous perversity. Abortion permits that."
  • Ann Coulter, lawyer and political commentator, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, 2002.

• "[T]he abortion patient has a right not only to be rid of the growth, called a fetus, in her body, but also has a right to a dead fetus. . . [I] never have any intention of trying to protect the fetus, if it can be saved. . . as a general principle [t]here should not be a live fetus."
  • Dr. Robert Crist, abortion doctor, testifying in federal court in 1980

• "The few doctors willing to replace those who are retiring are] mostly physicians who have had difficulty establishing regular ob-gyn practices. Mentioning . . . Out of [one abortion doctor's] first six months of work, there are nine malpractice suits ... After it was apparent the guy was a klutz, they kept using him, and trying to cover for him, because they couldn't find another provider."
  • Dr. Robert Crist, abortion doctor, St. Petersburg Times, June 3, 1990

• "In testimony Wednesday in St. Louis Circuit Court, Crist said that it is not uncommon for second-trimester fetuses to leave the womb feet-first, intact and with their hearts still beating. He sometimes crushes their skulls to get the fetuses out. Other times, he dismembers them."
  • Dr. Robert Crist, abortion doctor, paraphrased in the article "Abortion Doctor Gives Graphic Testimony Describing Abortion Procedure", St. Louis Post-Dispatch 5/25/2000

• My friend, O' Lordy / Went to take care of her own body / She got shot down in the road / She looked up before she went / She said 'This isn't really what I meant' / And the daily news said '2 with 1 stone'
  • Sheryl Crow, Hard to Make a Stand

D

• "If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience."
  • Daphne deJong, feminist author, in Feminism and Abortion: The Great Inconsistency, 1/7/1978

• "Until this century, the laws of both Britain and America made women a part of’ their husbands. By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. . . our law in general considers man and wife one person. The one person was, of course, the husband, who exerted absolute power over his wife and her property. She had no existence and therefore no protection under the law. The only thing a husband could not do was kill her. The earliest feminist battles were fought against the legal chattel status of women. Many feminists were among those who overturned the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1857, that a black slave was ‘property’ and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution. Feminism totally rejected the concept of ownership in regard to human beings. Yet when the Court ruled in 1973 that the fetus was the property of its mother, and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution, ‘liberated’ women danced in the streets."
  • Daphne deJong, feminist author, in Feminism and Abortion: The Great Inconsistency, 1/7/1978

• "The food situation in the world is serious enough, it seems to me, to justify an extension of birth control propaganda to include the practice of abortion. There must be a decreasing birth rate for some years to come and all means ought to be employed to bring it about if we are to avoid aggravation of all the evils of over population ... Let us frankly admit that birth control means just what it says and includes both prevention of conception and abortion."
  • Herman Dekker, letter to the Editor (Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood), Birth Control Review, 7/1920

• "I do think abortion is murder—of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that...legalistic distinctions among 'homicide,' 'justified homicide,' 'self-defense,' and 'murder' appear to me a semantic game. What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life."
  • Dr. Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, "Performing Abortions," Commentary Magazine 10/1976

• " 'Forceps, please,' Mr. Smith slaps into his hand what look like oversized ice-cube tongs. Holtzman pushes it into the vagina and tugs. He pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. 'There,' he says, 'A leg. You can always tell fetal size best by the extremities. Fifteen weeks is right in this case.' I turn to Mr. Smith. 'What did he say?' 'He pulled a leg off,' Mr. Smith says. 'Right here.' He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. It consists of a ripped thigh, a knee, a lower leg, a foot, and five toes. I start to shake very badly, but otherwise I feel nothing. Total shock is painless. 'I have the rib cage now,' Holtzman says, as he slams down another piece of the fetus. 'That's one thing you don't want to leave behind because it acts like a ball valve and infects everything.... There, I've got the head now. Also a piece of the placenta.' I look at the instrument table where next to the leg, and next to a mess he calls the rib cage but that I cannot recognize, there lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person."
  • Dr. Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic 1978

• "There was not one [abortion doctor] who at some point in the questioning did not say 'This is murder.'"
  • Dr. Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, discussing two years of research done for her 1978 book In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic

• "There's still the shame thing, even among people who are pro-choice ... We are still seen as dirty, even among our own people."
  • Diane Derzis, abortion clinic administrator, Atlanta Joumal Constitution, May 16, 1993

• "The the difference between the way of life and the way of death is great. Therefore, do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant."
  • The Didache, book of Christian apostolic teachings, circa 80 A.D.

• "now the profile of our country looks a little less hard nosed / but that picket line persisted and that clinic's since been closed / they keep pounding their fists on reality hoping it will break / but I don't think there's a one of us leads a life free of mistakes"
  • Ani DiFranco, Lost Woman Song

• "The fascists are some heavy dudes / They don't really give a damn about life / They just don't want a woman to control her body or have the right to choose / But baby that ain't nothin / They just want a male finger on the button / Because if you say war they will send them to die by the score / Aborting mission should be your volition / But if souter and thomas have their way / You'll be standing in line unable to get welfare while they're out hunting and fishing / It has always been around it will always have a niche / But they'll make it a privilege not a right / Accessible only to the rich / Pro-lifers should dig themselves / Cause life doesn't stop after birth / And to a child born to the unprepared / It might even just get worse"
  • Digable Planets, La Femme Fétal

• "Sonography in connection with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the screen should be turned away from the patient."
  • Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman, paraphrased in Obstetrics and Gynecology News, editorial 2/15/1986

• "To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an 'unintended benefit' of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good."
  • Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, from the essay Where Have All the Criminals Gone? Want to understand what made the crime rate drop in the 1990s? Look back to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973

E

• "No doctor, for ethical, moral or honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions...women don't like to do abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn't like to abort someone else's. We have much more trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men."
  • Dr. Edward Eichner, director of medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility, quoted in Rachel Weeping and Other Essays About Abortion, p.43, 1982

• "[Abortion opponents] love little babies, as long as they're in somebody else's uterus."
  • Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, Redbook Magazine, 8/1994

F

• “I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist. The findings did surprise me, but the results appear to be very robust because they persist across a series of disorders and a series of ages. . . . Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness.”
  • Professor David M. Fergusson, Christchurch Health and Development Study, commenting on research he directed, interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation on 3/1/2006 [15]

• "When you're a doctor who does these abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think that makes you feel? You know they're primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote and move on. In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along. The abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else."
  • Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, in "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure", New York Times, 2/26/1997

• "One of the facts of abortion is that women enter abortion clinics to kill their fetuses. It is a form of killing, you're ending a life."
  • Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure", New York Times, 2/26/1997

• "No matter how it is worded or performed, abortion hurts women. This won’t stop until women stand up in unison and say, ‘This is unacceptable. We deserve better.’ Lack of emotional and financial resources are the real undue burden and abortion will never lift that."
  • Serrin Foster, president of Feminists For Life, press release, 6/28/2000

G

• "(This) subject lies deeper down in woman’s wrongs than any other...I hesitate not to assert that most of (the responsibility for) this crime lies at the door of the male sex."
  • Matilda Gage, early feminist, in The Revolution, 4/9/1868

• "For God…has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life…Therefore from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes."
  • Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World),Second Vatican Council, promulgated 12/7/1965

• "Life is the division of human cells, a process that begins with conception. The [Supreme Court's abortion] ruling was unjust, and it is incumbent on the Congress to correct the injustice. I have always been supportive of pro-life legislation. I intend to remain steadfast on this issue…I believe that the life of the unborn should be protected at all costs."
  • Rep. Richard "Dick" Gephardt, U.S. Representative and former Democratic House majority leader, now in favor of legalized abortion, 1984

• "It seems to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime."
  • Mahatma Gandhi, in All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi

• "To earlier feminists who had fought for the vote and for fair treatment in the workplace, it had seemed obvious that the ready availability of abortion would facilitate the sexual exploitation of women. Women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton regarded free love, abortion, and easy divorce as disastrous for women and children. They would have regarded women who actively promoted those causes as foolish or deranged."
  • Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and Vatican official, "The Women of 'Roe v. Wade'", First Things, June/July 2003

• "Anti-choicers have declared war on women. Now it's up to us to fight back. If that means guarding the clinic doors with Uzis, then that's what will have to be done. Just once, I'd like to see someone blow up one of those churches. . . This week is anti-choice week at UB. If you see one of them showing their disgusting videos or playing with toy fetuses, do your part and spit at them. Kick them in the head. . . Their God is worth nothing compared to my body. Abortion is a bit bloody. So is a root canal. It's a fucking operation! If you think abortion is gruesome, you should see childbirth; an ordeal that is ten times more dangerous to a woman's health ... The anti-choice movement is like self-help for them. Too bad there's no 'Fanatics Anonymous' to give them the help they need."
  • Michelle Goldberg, "Rant for Choice", The Spectrum, student paper at the State University of New York at Buffalo, 10/1995

• "The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies."
  • Emma Goldman, anarchist, activist, in Mother Earth, 1911

• "During my 11 years in congress, I have consistently opposed federal funding for abortions. In my opinion, it is wrong to spend federal funds for what is arguably taking of a human life. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected, and I am committed to furthering this goal."
  • Al Gore, Former U.S. Vice President, , now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to a constituent, while U.S. Senator from Tennessee, 5/26/1987

• "It is typical of the contradictions that break women's hearts that when they avail themselves of their fragile right to abortion they often, even usually, went with grief and humiliation to carry out a painful duty that was presented to them as a privilege. Abortion is the latest in a long line of non-choices that begin at the very beginning with the time and the place and the manner of lovemaking."
  • Germaine Greer, feminist author and advocate of legal abortion, quoted in The New Republic, 10/5/1992

• "So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only foetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these."
  • Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny

• "The goal was ‘every child a wanted child’; it should also have been ‘every abortion a wanted abortion’, but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet."
  • Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman

• "[A]bortion is an integral part of family planning. Theoretically this means abortions at any stage of gestation. Therefore I favor the availability of abortion beyond 20 weeks.”
  • Dr. David Grundmann, medical director for Planned Parenthood of Australia, in his 1994 academic paper, Abortion After Twenty Weeks in Clinical Practice: Practical, Ethical and Legal Issues

H

• "For those who cannot be educated, sterilization or legalized abortion seems to be the only remedy, for we certainly do not want such stupid people to pollute the race with stupid offspring. The defective conditions of life call urgently for improvement."
  • Norman Haire, letter to the editor, Birth Control Review, 7/1930

• "Only now are we beginning to consider ... the concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual."
  • M.R. Harrison, in his popular medical textbook The Unborn Patient: Pre-Natal Diagnosis and Treatment, 1991

• "No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life..."
  • Dr. William F. Harrison, abortion doctor, from the essay Why I Provide Abortions 1996

• Reporter: What led you to develop D & X [dilation and extraction or "partial-birth abortion"]?
• Haskell: D & E's [dilation and evacuation], the procedure typically used for later abortions, have always been somewhat problematic because of the toughness and development of the fetal tissues. . . I just kept doing D & Es because that was what I was comfortable with, up until 24 weeks. But they were very tough. Sometimes it was a 45-minute operation. I noticed that some of the later D & Es were very, very easy. . . You see the easy ones would have a foot length presentation, you'd reach up and grab the foot of the fetus, pull the fetus down and the head would hang up and then you would collapse the head and take it out. It was easy. . . Then I said, `Well gee, if I just put the ultrasound up there I could see it all and I wouldn't have to feel around for it.' I did that and sure enough, I found it 99 percent of the time. Kind of serendipity.
  • "Dr. Martin Haskell, discussing the invention of his late-term abortion method, Cincinnati Medicine, Fall 1993 (U.S. Congressional Record, 1996, p. H10614)

• Reporter: [Is] the fetus . . . dead beforehand...?
• Haskell: No, it's really not. . . in my case, I would think probably about a third of those are definitely. . . dead before I actually start to remove the fetus. And probably the other two-thirds are not.
• Reporter: Is the skull procedure also done to make sure that the fetus is dead so you're not going to have the problem of a live birth?
• Haskell: It's immaterial. If you can't get it out, you can't get it out. . . The point here is to effect a safe legal abortion. I mean, you could say the same thing about the D&E [dilation and evacuation] procedure. You know, why do you do the D&E procedure? Why do you crush the fetus up inside the womb? To kill it before you take it out? Well, that happens, yes. But that's not why you do it. You do it to get it out. I could do the same thing with a D&E procedure...But that's not really the point. The point here is you're attempting to do an abortion. And that's the goal of your work, is to complete an abortion. . .
• Reporter: I wanted to make sure I have both you and (Dr.) McMahon saying 'No' then. That this is misinformation, these letters to the editor saying it's only done when the baby's already dead, in case of fetal demise and you have to do an autopsy. But some of them are saying they're getting that information from NAF [National Abortion Federation]. Have you talked to Barbara Radford or anyone over there?
• Haskell: Well, I had heard that they were giving that information, somebody over there might be giving information like that out. The people that staff the NAF office are not medical people. And many of them when I gave my paper, many of them came in, I learned later, to watch my paper because many of them have never seen an abortion performed of any kind.
• Reporter: Did you also show a video when you did that?
• Haskell: Yeah. I taped a procedure a couple of years ago, a very brief video, that simply showed the technique. The old story about a picture's worth a thousand words.
• Reporter: As National Right to Life will tell you.
• Haskell: Afterwards they were just amazed. They just had no idea. And here they're rabid supporters of abortion. They work in the office there. And...some of them have never seen one performed...And I'll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range...In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective..."
  • Dr. Martin Haskell, explaining how his late-term abortion method is used to effect safe abortions, to American Medical News (U.S. Congressional Record, 1996, p. H2919)

• "It's true that abortion providers are perceived as not very good doctors -- that they have no alternative so they do abortions, that they cannot earn a living any other way."
  • Dr. Richard Hausknecht, abortion doctor, in "Who Will Do Abortions Here?", New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1998

• "The early feminists found abortion to be the ultimate exploitation of women. [Women had to] become men to compete. We bought into that. We're smarter today. It's more empowering to go through with your pregnancy."
  • Patricia Heaton, Emmy-winning actress, Washington Times, 4/14/2005

• "I reject that criticism because this is indeed another kind of holocaust, by another name. At last count, more than 40 million unborn children have been deliberately, intentionally destroyed. What word adequately defines the scope of such slaughter? [After 9/11] the American people responded with shock, sadness and a deep and righteous anger — and rightly so. Yet let us not forget that every passing day in our country, more than three thousand innocent Americans are killed [through abortion]."
  • Jesse Helms, former U.S. Senator, in his autobiography Here's Where I Stand, 2005

• "Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit."
  • Nat Hentoff, Jewish atheist leftist pro-lifer, Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left 11/30/1992

• “In medical practice, there are few surgical procedures given so little attention and so underrated in its potential hazard as abortion.”
  • Dr. Warren Hern, abortion practitioner and author of Abortion Practice (1990), the textbook most widely used in the United States to teach abortion to medical personnel

• "The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."
  • Dr. Warren Hern, abortion doctor, at the Associations of Planned Parenthood Physicians meeting, San Diego, October 26, 1978

• "Television interviews in particular should focus on the public issue involved (right to confidential and professional medical care, freedom of choice and so forth) and not on the specific details of the procedure."
• "The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember."
• "A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus."
• "The aggregate fetal tissue is weighed, then the following fetal parts are measured, foot length, knee to heel length, and biparietal diameter."
• "Vital signs should be observed regularly, and a Doppler [for listening to the fetal heartbeat] inaudible to the patient should be used at intervals to determine the presence or absence of fetal heart tones. This [informed consent] is a controversial area, but most professionals in the field feel that it is not advisable for patients to view the products of conception, to be told the sex of the fetus, or to be informed of a multiple pregnancy."
  • Dr. Warren Hern, excerpted from his renown medical textbook Abortion Practice, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1984

• "Most physicians regard abortion as a stigmatized operation done by people who are otherwise incompetent and can't do anything else."
  • Dr. Warren Hern, abortion doctor, American Medical News, September 5, 1994

• "I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion."
  • from the Hippocratic Oath, attributed to the school of Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine,” circa 400 B.C.

I

• "The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."
  • Irish Constitution, 8th Amendment, adopted by popular referendum, 10/7/1983

• Kathy Ireland: Show me some evidence it's not a human being.
• Bill Maher: Let me reverse that. Tell me the evidence it is a human.
• Kathy Ireland: A moment after conception the genetic blueprint is complete. We have our blood type, our fingerprints, the sex is determined at the moment of conception. We know it is life. What kind of life is it? According to the laws of biogenesis, all life comes from preexisting life. Each species reproduces after its own kind. So human beings can only reproduce other human beings.
  • Kathy Ireland, supermodel, appearing on Bill Maher's television show Politically Incorrect, 2/28/2000

• "I was once pro-choice and the thing that changed my mind was, I read my husband’s biology books, medical books, and what I learned . . . At the moment of conception, a life starts. And this life has its own unique set of DNA, which contains a blueprint for the whole genetic make-up. The sex is determined. We know there is a life because it is growing and changing."
  • Kathy Ireland, supermodel, appearing on the television show Politically Incorrect, 5/1/1998

J

• "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life ... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned."
  • Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, 1/1977

• "What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth."
  • Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, 1/1977

• "Another area that concerns me greatly, namely because I know how it has been used with regard to race, is the psycholinguistics involved in this whole issue of abortion. If something can be dehumanized through the rhetoric used to describe it, then the major battle has been won. . . That is why the Constitution called us three-fifths human and then whites further dehumanized us by calling us niggers. It was part of the dehumanizing process. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do. . . Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder; they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified."
  • Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, 1/1977

• "The care of human life and not its destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
  • Thomas Jefferson, to Maryland Republicans, 1809

• "The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn."
  • Pope John Paul II, London, June 9, 1991

• "America first proclaimed its independence on the basis of self-evident moral truths. America will remain a beacon of freedom for the world as long as it stands by those moral truths which are the very heart of its historical experience. And so America: If you want peace, work for justice. If you want justice, defend life."
  • Pope John Paul II, St. Louis, Missouri, 1/28/1999.

• "The public has a right to know whether abortion methods are being altered to obtain organs, whether live births sometimes occur during such procedures, and whether baby body parts are being sold for profit."
  • Douglas Johnson, Legislative Director of National Right to Life Committee

K

• "We are referred to substantial medical authority that D [partial-birth abortion] perverts the natural birth process to a greater degree than [D&E], commandeering the live birth process until the skull is pierced. Witnesses to the procedure relate that the fingers and feet of the fetus are moving prior to the piercing of the skull; when the scissors are inserted in the back of the head, the fetus' body, wholly outside the woman's body and alive, reacts as though startled and goes limp. D[partial-birth abortion]'s stronger resemblance to infanticide means Nebraska could conclude the procedure presents a greater risk of disrespect for life and a consequent greater risk to the profession and society, which depend for their sustenance upon reciprocal recognition of dignity and respect. The Court is without authority to second-guess this conclusion."
  • Justice Anthony Kennedy, discussing the partial-birth abortion ban in his dissent in the case Stenberg v Carhart, 2000

• "The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) 'could identify no circumstances under which D[partial-birth abortion] would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.' The American Medical Association agrees...."
  • Justice Anthony Kennedy, discussing the partial-birth abortion ban in his dissent in the case Stenberg v Carhart, 2000

• "While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized -- the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old."
  • Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to a constituent, 8/3/1971 [16]

• "I share the confidence of those who feel that America is working to care for its unwanted as well as wanted children, protecting particularly those who cannot protect themselves. I also share the opinions of those who do not accept abortion as a response to our society's problems -- an inadequate welfare system, unsatisfactory job training programs, and insufficient financial support for all its citizens."
  • Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to a constituent, 8/3/1971 [17][18][19] [20]

• "When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."
  • Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to a constituent, 8/3/1971 [21][22][23] [24]

L

• "'If you won't stand up for your own child, somebody has to.' He believed it, and he was convinced it was God's view. It made sense to him. But he also knew she could reject it out of hand simply because he was a man. How could he understand? No one was suggesting what he could or could not do with his own body. He had wanted to tell her he understood that, but again, what if that unborn child was a female? Who was standing up for the rights of that woman's body?"
  • Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, excerpted from the novel Nicolae p.297, third book from the Left Behind novels

• "It is beyond comprehension why a group of rabbis would support partial-birth abortion. . . The message of the Torah is one of life. Abortion on demand is simply intolerable in the Jewish tradition. To sanction something so heinous as partial-birth abortion is proof of a culture of death standing in marked opposition to the Torah’s ethic of life. . . Rather than work against Judeo-Christian moral principles, as these rabbis are doing, it is incumbent upon Jews to ally with Christians in upholding the moral principles we have in common. . . Together, we must actively oppose partial birth abortion."
  • "Rabbi Daniel Lapin, in a press release issued by his organization, Toward Tradition, 9/18/2000

• "[O]ne of the greatest sages of Jewish Law of the late 20th century, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, unequivocally described abortion as a form of murder, albeit a form that is exempt from capital punishment. But those of us faithful to our tradition have obviously failed to persuade our fellow Jews that abortion equals murder."
  • Rabbi Daniel Lapin, in Weeping About our Families, 2/24/2001

• "The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces: what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities."
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1997)

• "Atheism, Gay Marriage, Intermarriage, Non-Kosher Food, Partial-Birth Abortion - all of these are legitimate mainstream ideas within Reform 'Judaism.' Judaism has lost more Jews through the efforts of Reform than through Hitler's gas ovens."
  • Rabbi Yehuda Levin, in Fooling America's Jews, 11/16/1997

• "FREE ABORTIONS for Hurricane Katrina Survivors - At LRFPS [Little Rock Family Planning Services] we are offering abortions at no charge to victims of Hurricane Katrina. In order to receive this service you MUST have a government issued picture ID showing your home address in the following counties/parishes: Jackson, Harrison, and Hancock - Mississippi. Orleans, Kenner, Plaquemines, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, Jefferson, Charles, Terrabone, and St. James - Louisiana."
  • Little Rock Family Planning Services, appearing on the homepage of the internet website of LRFPS on 10/2/2005

• We lived our dreams and challenged fate / In tears she told me she was late / Then Sally let his pigeons out to fly / She left one night with just a nod / Was lost in some back alley job / I close my eyes and Sally's pigeons fly
  • Cyndi Lauper, Sally's Pigeons

• "Given the National Organization for Women’s membership and proclivities, it’s no wonder that people now view the NOW gang as being obsessed with only two issues: abortion rights and lesbian rights."
  • Rush Limbaugh, in The Way Things Ought To Be, 1992

• "I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. The term describes any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion."
  • Rush Limbaugh, in The Way Things Ought To Be, 1992

• "A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren’t necessary. 'Nothing matters but me', says the feminazi...the fetus doesn't matter, it's an unviable tissue mass. Feminazis have adopted abortion as a kind of sacrament for their religion/politics of alienation and bitterness."
  • Rush Limbaugh, in The Way Things Ought To Be, 1992

• "Having a baby and giving it up for adoption, as pro-life people advocate, is not seen by most pro-choice people as a moral solution to the abortion problem. To transform a fetus into a baby and then send it out into a world where the parents can have no assurance that it will be well-loved and cared for is, for pro-choice people, the height of moral irresponsibility."
  • Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984)

• "A group of women who valued motherhood, but valued it on their own timetable, began to make a new claim, one that had never surfaced in the abortion debate before this, that abortion was a woman's right. Most significantly, they argued that this right to abortion was essential to their right to equality -- the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers."
  • Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984)

• "Reasonable people who are located in very different parts of the social world find themselves differentially exposed to diverse realities, and this differential exposure leads each of them to come up with different -- but often equally reasonable -- constructions of the world. Similarly, even deeply devout religious people, because they too are located in different parts of the social world and, furthermore, come from different religious and cultural traditions, can disagree about what God's will is in any particular situation. When combined with the fact that attitudes toward abortion rest on these deep, rarely examined notions about the world, it is unambiguously clear why the abortion debate is so heated and why the chances for rational discussion, reasoned arguments, and mutual accomodation are so slim."
  • Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984)

• "Pro-choice and pro-life activists live in different worlds, and the scope of their lives, as both adults and children, fortifies them in their belief that their own views on abortion are the more correct, the more moral, and more reasonable. When added to this is the fact that should 'the other side' win, one group of women will see they very real devaluation of their lives and life resources, it is not surprising that the abortion debate has generated so much heat and so little light."
  • Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984)

• "...The fact that only poor women are denied reproductive freedom when abortions are illegal is unpersuasive to those who oppose abortion on moral grounds."
  • Kristin Luker, Dubious Conceptions (1996)

• "In short, there are no empirical grounds for assuming that women have an à priori preference for contraception over abortion."
  • Kristin Luker, Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept (1975)

M

• "The cruel irony is that abortion has been presented as something that would set a woman free. This brings to mind the gypsy in Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore. Outraged by the count’s cruel injustice, she stole his infant son and, in a crazed act of vengeance, flung him into the fire. Or so she thought. For, in turning around, she discovered the count’s son lay safe on the ground behind her; it was her own son she had thrown into the flames. Abortion can present itself as glittering liberty, a defiant way to cast off the shackles of injustice. That illusion lasts only until you realize who it was that you threw into the flames. So the second point to make when trying to persuade is that abortion hurts women; it does not deliver on its promise to liberate them."
  • Fredrica Matthewes-Green, "Wanted: A New Pro-life Strategy", Christianity Today, 1/12/1998

• "When we question whether someone is a person, it is because we want to kill him. We do this with our enemies in wartime, or with anyone we would like to enslave or exploit. Before we can feel comfortable treating others this way, we have to expel them from the human community. But there's just no logical reason to expel the unborn."
  • Fredrica Matthewes-Green, "Personhood of the Unborn", on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, 1/21/1998

• "People may believe the soul doesn't appear till six months, or departs at 42 years, or takes alternate Tuesdays off. It's fine for people to believe whatever they want, but they can't use these beliefs to write laws that justify killing. Being unique, alive, and human is qualification enough to be part of our human family."
  • Fredrica Matthewes-Green, "Personhood of the Unborn", on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, 1/21/1998

• "I have some bad news: the abortion debate is over. I have some good news: it's reemerging transformed. This moment of silence may have been necessary for hardened hearts to hear the whisper of conscience. Pro-choice leaders mourn that disapproval of abortion is rising, while their own troops are graying. The average member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) is 55, while college freshmen have dropped their support for legalized abortion from 65% to 51% since 1990. A 1996 poll found those most likely to agree that 'abortion is the same thing as murdering a child'--a stunning 56%-- are between the ages of 18 and 29. No wonder young people oppose abortion. Anyone under the age of 27 could have been killed this way. A third of their generation was."
  • Fredrica Matthewes-Green, "The Abortion Debate is Over", Christianity Today, 12/6/1999

• "We have treated the loss of our fetuses as a theoretical loss, a sad-but-necessary loss, as of civilians in wartime. We have not yet realized that the offspring lost are not the enemy's, nor our neighbor's, but our own. And it is not a loss of inert, amorphous tissue, but of a growing being unique in history."
  • Frederica Mathewes-Green, member of the Board of Advisors of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, "The Bitter Price of Choice", Washington Times, 12/22/1989

• "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."
  • Frederica Mathewes-Green, member of the Board of Advisors of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, in her book Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion, 1997

• "One of my most important activities is that I am involved, together with Sandra Cano of Doe vs. Bolton, in the efforts of the Texas Justice Foundation (and other groups) to work for the reversal of the Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions. The approach we are taking is to show that the lives and rights of women have not been advanced or enhanced, but rather destroyed, by abortion-on-demand. We are collecting affidavits from women who have been harmed by abortion, from women who are convinced that authentic feminism is pro-life, and from professionals who know that Roe has weakened the moral fabric of the legal and medical professions."
  • Norma McCorvey, the anonymous litigant known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark abortion case, Roe vs. Wade in her book Won by Love, 6/17/2003 [25] [26]

• “Most of the patients come to our abortion clinic as a result of failure of a birth control method, or a failure of our system to provide birth control."
  • Dr. Clayton H. McCracken, director of Inter Mountain Planned Parenthood, Fall 2000

• "Once you decide the uterus must be emptied, you then have to have 100% allegiance to maternal risk. There's no justification to doing a more dangerous procedure because somehow this doesn't offend your sensibilities as much."
  • Dr. James T. McMahon, American Medical News (U.S. Congressional Record, 1996, p. H10634)

• "If I see a case...after 20 weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it because the potential is so imminently there. I think, 'Gee, it's too bad that this child couldn't be adopted.' On the other hand, I have another position, which I think is superior in the hierarchy of questions, and that is: 'Who owns the child?' It's got to be the mother."
  • Dr. James T. McMahon, American Medical News, 7/5/1993

• “We think abortion is a bad thing. No woman wants to have an abortion.”
  • Kate Michelman, then Executive Director of National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, in a taped Philadelphia Inquirer interview 1993

• "The fact is that late term abortions are exceedingly rare. They are performed only when necessary to preserve a woman's health or life, or when a woman is carrying a fetus with lethal anomalies, many of which would die soon after birth. Again, the fact is that these abortions, these terminations are compelled by life and, life and health reasons and grave fetal abnormalities."
  • Kate Michelman, President, National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL], making a false claim at a news conference, 11/7/1995

• "[Late-term abortions] are rare terminations, Tony [Snow]. They occur very rarely. They occur under the most difficult of circumstances, as I said...these are pregnancies that have gone awry."
  • Kate Michelman, NARAL President, making a false claim on FOX News Sunday, 6/2/1996

• "But late-term abortions are only used under the most compelling of circumstances--to protect a woman's health or life or because of grave fetal abnormality."
  • Kate Michelman, NARAL President, making a false claim in the Washington Times, 6/16/1996

• "And, by the way, my belief is that if men were the ones getting pregnant, abortions would be easier to get than food poisoning in Moscow."
  • Dennis Miller, Ranting Again, 1999

N

• "I don’t think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we’ve seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion."
  • Ralph Nader, Interview on ‘Meet the Press’ May 7, 2000 [27]

• "Fewer women would have abortions if wombs had windows."
  • Dr. Bernard Nathanson, former abortion doctor turned pro-life, in his book Aborting America, 1979

• "The practice of abortion was revolutionized at virtually the same moment that the laws were revolutionized, through the widespread introduction of suction curettage in 1970. Even without a suction machine, a simple combination of catheter and syringe can produce enough suction to carry out a safe early abortion. As for the self-induced abortion, by thrusting a coat hanger or other dangerous object into the womb, this will also be a thing of the past."
  • Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America (Doubleday, 1979).

• "In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - Hurricane Katrina victims can call the NAF [National Abortion Federation] toll-free hotline to speak with professional hotline operators. . . Many NAF member clinics throughout the country are offering free [abortions] or significantly reduced fees for [abortions] for women from the disaster regions. . . Donations to our Hotline Assistance Fund will allow us to provide the financial assistance desperately needed by women affected by Hurricane Katrina."
  • National Abortion Federation, appearing on the homepage of the internet website of NAF on 10/2/2005

• "RU-486 is properly called an 'abortifacient.' Because it is a drug that can induce a menstrual period after the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, it can terminate a woman's pregnancy in its earliest stages."
  • National Abortion Rights Action League, "Factsheet" promoting FDA approval of the RU-486 abortion pill, 1990

• "The right to life, inherent in each of the inhabitants of the nation and the world, is the principal axis of human rights and, therefore, merits the determined attention of the government."
  • Nicaraguan government decree declaring March 25, 2000, as the "National Day of the Unborn"

• "Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned...Is there no remedy for all this ante-natal child murder?...Perhaps there will come a time when...an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood...and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with."
  • Sarah Norton, early feminist, in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 11/9/1870

O

• "The poor cry out for justice and equality, and we respond with legalized abortion. I believe that in a society that permits the life of even one individual to be dependent on whether that life is ‘wanted’ or not, all its citizens stand in danger...We do not have equal opportunities. Abortion is a cruel way out."
  • Graciela Olivarez, Chicana civil rights and anti-poverty activist, 1972

• "I am in no position to judge other women, you know. But I mean, why did she get pregnant? It's not good for women to go through the procedure [abortion] and have something living sucked out of their bodies. It belittles women. Even though some women say, 'Oh, I don't mind to have one,' every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem smaller and smaller and smaller."
  • Dolores O'Riordan, lead vocalist of The Cranberries, You! magazine, June/July 1996

P

• "People are interested in having babies; they're just not interested in having 15 babies. The average American woman spends 23 years of her life preventing pregnancy. No one's going 23 years not having sex."
  • Cristina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex, as quoted in "I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck", Rachel Kramer Bussel, Village Voice January 13, 2006

• "Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women."
  • Alice Paul, author of the 1923 U.S. Equal Rights Amendment

• "Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers.'"
  • Leonard Peikoff (Objectivism, in the Chapter on Government)

• "Is birth control an abortion? Definitely not; an abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun."
  • Planned Parenthood pamphlet, 8/1963

• "Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas is working closely with Planned Parenthood of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta (PPLAMD) to ensure that individuals from Louisiana can continue to get birth control and other reproductive health services [including abortion] during the current crisis."
  • Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas, appealing for donations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on its website, 9/1/2005

• "Do you think abortion is tragic and terrible and wrong, that Roe v. Wade went too far and that the prochoice movement is elitist, unfeeling, overbearing, overreaching and quite possibly dead? In the current debate over abortion, that makes you a prochoicer. As the nation passes the thirty-third anniversary of Roe, it is hard to find anyone who will say a good word in public for abortion rights, let alone for abortion itself. Abortion has become a bit like flag-burning -- something that offends all right-thinking people but needs to be legal for reasons of abstract principle ('choice'). Unwanted pregnancy has become like, I don't know, smoking crack: the mark of a weak, undisciplined person of the lower orders. On the New York Times op-ed page, William Saletan argues that prochoicers should concede that 'abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero,' and calls for 'an explicit pro-choice war on the abortion rate.' Sounding a "clear anti-abortion message,' prochoicers should promote a basket of 'solutions' to unintended pregnancy: the Prevention First Act, which calls for federal funding for family planning programs; expanded access to health insurance and emergency contraception; comprehensive sex education. 'Some pro-choice activists' are even 'pushing for more contraceptive diligence in the abortion counseling process, especially on the part of those women who come back for a second abortion.' Give those sluts the lecture they deserve. . . .[T]here's another problem. Inevitably, attacking abortion as a great evil means attacking providers and patients. If abortion is so bad, why not stigmatize the doctors who perform them? Deny the clinic a permit in your town? Make women feel guilty and ashamed for choosing it and make them sweat so they won't screw up again? Ironically, improvements in contraception have made unwanted pregnancy look more like a personal failing. 'Why was I so careful? Because I never wanted to have an abortion,' wrote 32-year-old Laurie Gigliotti in response to Saletan's op-ed, describing her super-vigilant approach to safe sex. You can just see how unwanted pregnancy will join obesity and smoking as unacceptable behavior in polite society. But how is all this censoriousness supposed to help women control their fertility? If half of all pregnancies are unplanned, it doesn't make sense to treat them as individual sins."
  • Katha Pollitt, "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation, 2/5/2006

• "We are always told that violent anti-choicers are a mere fringe. Obviously, few anti-choicers commit murder or arson. But, as the Matthew Shepard case reminds us, extreme vocabulary creates a climate of moral permission for extreme acts. This is a movement whose main spokespeople, many of them mantled in clerical or political authority, regularly use words like 'baby killers', 'murder', 'holocaust', and 'Nazis', thus legitimizing just about anything. After all, the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler are heroes."
  • Katha Pollitt, "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation, 11/16/1998 (reprinted in Subject to Debate (2001))

• "Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) -- Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists -- but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf."
  • Katha Pollitt, "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation, 5/1/2000 (reprinted in Subject to Debate (2001))

• "What would the alternative be? Abortion by prayer? By edict? Upon seeking consensus? After groveling? Women have thought long and hard about this decision before they ever get to my clinic. In fact, most of them have been agonizing for days or even weeks, some to the extent of rescheduling their appointments several times."
  • Suzanne T. Poppema, discussing the phrase "abortion on demand", in Why I Am An Abortion Doctor (1996)

• "In the case of an unwanted pregnancy, the existential choice for a woman is not abortion vs. no abortion, but, as [Garrett Hardin] has pointed out, abortion vs. compulsory childbearing. If others can force her to be a mother... then she is coerced into putting her body at the disposal of the fetus as if she were an unclaimed natural resource or a chattel slave.... Thus, the woman's most fundamental right of choice, the right to control her own body and happiness, is being abrogated."
  • Sharon Presley and Robert Cooke , The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense, Association of Libertarian Feminists

Q

R

• "One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."
  • Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975.

• "We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life."
  • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.

• "I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born."
  • Ronald Reagan, quoted in New York Times, September 22, 1980

• "The fact that a majority of the States reflecting, after all, the majority sentiment in those States, have had restrictions on abortions for at least a century is a strong indication, it seems to me, that the asserted right to an abortion is not ‘so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental…’"
  • Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, U.S. Supreme Court, one of two dissenters against the majority opinion in the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, 1/22/1973

• "Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. . . In a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no 'abortion issue'. . . Abortion is violence. . . It is the offspring, and will continue to be the accuser of a more pervasive and prevalent violence, the violence of rapism."
  • Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and author and advocate of legal abortion, in Of Woman Born, 1976

• "Abortion, it's beautiful, it's beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, 'cause you know they are fucking. . . When a woman gets pregnant, it’s a choice between the woman and her girlfriends. One girlfriend goes, 'Child, you should have that baby — that man got some good hair.' And the other girlfriend says, 'Child, why we even talking about this — ain’t we supposed to go to Cancun next week? Get rid of that baby!' [That] is how life is decided in America."
  • Chris Rock, comedian, in his stand-up comedy routine, February 2005 [28]

S

• "If the abortion is well done, we don't have to watch the baby die. So we inject a salt solution. The result is like putting salt on a slug, but we don't have to watch it."
  • Dr. Russell Sacco, abortion doctor, "Infants Aborted Alive: Officials Wink at Laws" The Oregon Journal, 3/14/1982

• Glendon: Why did you and so many other constitutional lawyers stop criticizing the Court’s abortion decisions after most of you had been highly critical of Roe v. Wade?
• Sacks: I suppose it was because we had been made to understand that the abortion issue was so important to the women in our lives, and it just did not seem that important to most of us.
  • Al Sacks, as Dean of Harvard Law School circa 1985, quoted by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, in First Things, June/July 2003

• "It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, "Women in Germany", Birth Control Review, 12/1920

• "[It is] the most barbaric method [of family planning], the killing of babies — infanticide — abortion."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in My Fight for Birth Control, 1931

• "...we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way — no matter how early it was performed it was taking a life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way — it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in An Autobiography, 1938

• "Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. . . Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in An Autobiography, 1938

• "Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure... It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Woman and the New Race, Chapter 2.

• ""It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Woman and the New Race, Chapter 2.

• "While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization."
  • Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Woman and the New Race, Chapter 10.

• "But unlike abortion today, in most states even the slaveholder did not have the unlimited right to kill his slave."
  • Rick Santorum, U.S. Senator, 7/05/2005

• "It thus appears the mansion of constitutionalized abortion law, constructed overnight in Roe v. Wade, must be disassembled doorjamb by doorjamb…"
  • Justice Antonin Scalia, as quoted in Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court's Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice, edited by Kevin A. Ring, 2004

• "I am optimistic enough to believe that, one day, Stenberg v. Carhart will be assigned its rightful place in the history of this Court’s jurisprudence beside Korematsu and Dred Scott."
  • Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, 2000

• "The state could have been concerned about rendering society callous to infanticide ... the horror of seeing a live human creature outside the womb dismembered. Can't that be a valid societal interest?"
  • Justice Antonin Scalia, questioning attorneys during oral arguments in US Supreme Court case Stenberg vs. Carhart, 4/25/2000

• "The method of killing a human child, one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child, proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion... the notion that the constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, 'to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,' prohibits the states from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd."
  • Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, 2000

• "If only for the sake of its own preservation, the Court should return this matter to the people – where the Constitution, by its silence on the subject, left it – and let them decide, State by State, whether this practice should be allowed."
  • Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion in Stenberg v. Carhart, 2000

• "A person's a person, no matter how small."
  • common pro-life slogan, taken from Horton Hears a Who, the 1954 Dr. Seuss childrens' book about an elephant who tries to protect tiny creatures on a speck of dust, but makes no mention of abortion.

• "If President Clinton had been standing were I was standing at that moment he would not veto this bill. . . A mother was six months pregnant. A doctor told her that the baby had Downs Syndrome and she decided to have an abortion. She came in the first two days to have the laminaria inserted and changed, and she cried the whole time. . . On the third day Dr. [Martin] Haskell brought the ultrasound in and hooked it up so that he could see the baby. . . On the ultrasound screen I could see the heart beating. . . Dr. Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms--everything but the head. The doctor kept the baby's head just inside the uterus. The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors through the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startled reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby was completely limp. . . I was really completely unprepared for what I was seeing. I almost threw up as I watched the doctor do these things. . . After that, the doctor delivered the baby's head, cut his umbilical cord and threw him into a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had used. I saw the baby move in the pan. . . I asked another nurse and she said it was just 'reflexes.'. . . The woman wanted to see her baby, so they cleaned him up, put him in a blanket and handed him to her. . . She cried the whole time, and she kept saying, 'I'm so sorry, please forgive me!'"
  • Brenda Pratt Shafer, registered nurse for late-term abortion doctor Dr. Martin Haskell at Women's Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, describing the procedure in sworn testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, 1995

• And since a man can't make one / He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one
  • Tupac Shakur, Keep Ya Head Up

• "The pro-life groups were right about one thing, the location of the baby inside or outside the womb cannot make much of a moral differ ence. We cannot coherently hold it is alright to kill a fetus a week before birth, but as soon as the baby is born everything must be done to keep it alive. The solution, however, is not to accept the pro-life view that the fetus is a human being with the same moral status as yours or mine. The solution is the very opposite, to abandon the idea that all human life is of equal worth."
  • Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist, "Bioethics: The Case of the Fetus", in the New York Review of Books, 8/5/1976

• Q: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children?
• Singer: It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself.
• Q: Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale?
• Singer: No.
• Q: Would it be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities?
• Singer: [This question] should be raised as soon as possible after birth.
• Q: What about Roe v. Wade?
• Singer: [Abortion] should have been left to legislatures...[Roe v. Wade was] a piece of judicial legislation...[it is] undemocratic to take major decisions like this out of the hands of people.
  • Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist, discussing his support of euthanasia, infanticide and abortion of the disabled, "Blue-state philosopher", World Magazine, 11/27/2004

• "[M]y ethical position is a form of preference-utilitarianism. . . I apply this ethic to such issues as. . . abortion, euthanasia and infanticide. . . [This] approach to these issues leads to striking conclusions. It offers a clear-cut account of why abortion is ethically justifiable. . . Some of my conclusions have been found shocking. . . In Germany, my advocacy of active euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants has generated heated controversy."
  • Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist, "A Philosophical Self-Portrait", The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, 1997

• "Suppose that a newborn baby is diagnosed as a haemophiliac. The parents, daunted by the prospect of bringing up