Category: Other Quotes by Providers

“A counselor at an abortion clinic told me that when adoption is mentioned as an option, a typical reaction from many women goes something like this: “Are you kidding!? Give my baby to some stranger? I could never do that!” What these women are feeling is instinctual – it’s a combination of self-preservation, and a maternal obligation to the child. Giving up a child for adoption is very traumatic; it can haunt a woman forever. This relates to women’s strong need to control what happens to their children. The fetus is theirs. It’s in their body. And they feel obligated to it. They have a gut feeling that it’s irresponsible to give your children to strangers – good mothers simply don’t do such things. Most women feel that it’s better to prevent the birth of a child than consign it to an uncertain fate.”

Joyce Arthur. “The Fetus Focus Fallacy.” Pro-Choice Press [Pro-Choice Action Network], March 2005. Downloaded from http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/fetus-focus-fallacy.shtml on December 31, 2007.

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From Anne Finger, clinic worker:

“Each day at the clinic I confronted what it meant to have come control over our wombs and less control over our social circumstances. You can decide to no longer be pregnant, you can walk into a clinic and plunk down your Medi-Cal card…or two hundred dollars in cash, but you can’t decide not to be poor anymore, or to have support so that you can finish school, or to have a partner who wants to raise a child with you…

We’ve won the right [to legal abortion] however tenuously, but now control of reproduction is expected; we are expected to have children when we can afford them, to schedule our pregnancies to coincide with the demands of education and employment….Our victories are always partial ones; we win part of what we wanted, and then find our victories turned into something else.”

Anne Finger. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seattle, Washington: Seal Press 1990) 55-56

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One clinic worker says:

“Sometimes I loved working at the clinic: I felt like a miracle worker. Women came in and their futures were transformed. I was of use, and I thought how rare that was in this world: to get paid for doing something worth doing….but sometimes, I hated it. I hated to see women in pain. The pain never lasted for very long…but still it was probably the most painful thing they’d ever felt. I hated to hear women say:

“I just killed my baby.”

“I’m never going to have sex again.”

A few women told me, when it was over, that they understood how the “right to life” felt, or that abortion shouldn’t be legal.”

Anne Finger. Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seattle, Washington: Seal Press 1990) p 52

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One pro-choice author said, after an interview of founder of Catholic’s for Free Choice Francis Kissling:

“She had daily hands-on contact with women who were in the process of making the painful and, for some, the traumatic decision to terminate a pregnancy. She listened to the reasons that women wanted abortions, and rarely found them to be frivolous. She also observed that the women who came to her clinic weren’t concerned about their reproductive “rights.” This was something they needed for emotional, physical or economic reasons. There was no political satisfaction in the decision.”

Marian Faux (author of Roe v. Wade) Crusaders: Voices from the Abortion Front (New York: Carol Publishing Group) 1990 p 237

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