Category: Miscellaneous Quotes

From a woman who became pregnant late in life, after her other children were grown. She considered abortion, but had her baby. She has no regrets and says:

“We have found special pleasure in having our “bonus baby” now that her siblings are away. We have the kind of close conversation with her at dinner that was rarely possible when our noisy threesome was at the table.”… Bonus baby and her mother “enjoy an easy intimacy, her questions about the adult world recalling those I asked in my own girlhood as an only child. She loves to report the responses over the telephone to her brothers and sister for verification and delights, as I do, in the abundant love she receives from them even at a distance… Older mother and young daughter, our relationship is rich – unsettling and satisfying, as is any relationship bound by love.”

Faith Abbott “A Tale of Two Women” Human Life Review Spring 1993

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Catherine Coyle, PhD says:

“Some clinicians have observed that batterers often beat their pregnant partners’ bellies and display regressions that seem to indicate rage at the fetus they believe competes for their partners’ love. Such observations appear to be supported by women who were queried about their beliefs as to why their partners beat them.”

Cambell, JC, Garcia-Moreno C., & Sharps, P. “Abuse during pregnancy in industrialized and developing countries” Violence Against Women 10 (7) 2004

Quoted in Catherine Coyle, PhD “Intimate Partner Violence” Rachel M. MacNair, editor Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion (Kansas City, MO: Feminism & Nonviolence Studies Association, 2016)

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The media frequently portrays protesters outside abortion facilities as violent fanatics. This pro-abortion book about doulas who work in abortion clinics captures the polite exchange between a worker going into the clinic and the pro-lifers outside:

“They politely say good morning and offer her a “Jesus Saves” pamphlet as she bounces lightly up the stairs. She tells them, “No thank you.”

Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (New York: Feminist Press, 2016) 205

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In The New York Times, Dr. Deborah Oyer, medical director and owner of Aurora Medical Services in Seattle (an abortion clinic) explains how women often try to hide their abortions from their regular doctor:

“In addition, Dr. Oyer said, many women do not want their doctor — or anyone in their town — to know they had an abortion. ”I can’t tell you how many women who come on their own say, ‘Oh, I can’t tell my doctor,’ ” Dr. Oyer said. ”And sometimes their doctor is someone who does abortions in their own office.”

Gina Kolata.” Wary doctors spurn new abortion pill; some doctors insist that a surgical abortion remains a better alternative than the new pill.” The New York Times Nov 14, 2000

The stigma surrounding abortion influences women to keep their abortions secret from people who know them and see them on a regular basis.

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In an article featuring women’s stories of abortion, one woman describes how she protected her baby even though she was planning to abort him or her:

“Ironically (everything seems ironic in retrospect), my sister’s wedding was the day before the abortion-in Colorado. I flew out there knowing I was pregnant, knowing my marriage was failing, knowing I was having an abortion Monday morning. I refused to go through the security gates at the airport because I was pregnant. Despite my plan for an abortion 72 hours later, I was protecting my baby.”

Helen Susan Edelman, “Safe to Talk: Abortion Narratives as a Rite of Return,” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 4 (1996)

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Peace/pro-life activist Juli Loesch says:

“…I was poor and was raised poor, too. In my neighborhood abortion was never anything anyone talked about, it was simply unknown. No one ever did it. No one ever heard of it….

Of all the rights that poor people have demanded, and we’ve demanded them all along, this is the right that we’ve never asked for but we got. You know, you can’t get a house, but you can get your family cut down to size.”

Juli Loesch, in roundtable discussion on “Abortion: A Question of Survival?” WIN, 1 Aug. 1980, 23

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Pro-choice author Catherine Whitney makes the following ironic statement:

“Each year at least 1 million teenagers are faced with [unplanned pregnancies]. Half of them get abortions…They are truly the youngest victims of the abortion conflict.”

Catherine Whitney Whose Life? (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991) 176

What about these victims?

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Two abortion doulas say that abortion is sometimes difficult for women:

“There were patients for whom the procedure was straightforward, and there were patients for whom it wasn’t straightforward, where it was difficult technically, difficult emotionally.”

Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell The Doulas: Radical Care for Pregnant People (New York: Feminist Press, 2016) 232

Even pro-abortion people admit that for many women, abortion is a difficult and painful thing to go through.

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