Category: Quotes

Pro-choice author: abortion is shrouded in “stigma and shame”

British pro-choice reporter Daisy Buchanan wrote:

“…we as a society, struggle to talk about abortion. All over the world, over pints, cocktails or cups of tea, we share stories about sex, family, relationships and careers – but terminating a pregnancy is never an easy subject to broach…We rarely have frank conversations about abortion. The subject is shrouded in stigma and shame…

If I thought of it as an entirely medical matter, I wouldn’t be scared to mention it to my friends and I’m sure they’d feel more comfortable asking me for any support they needed. We can’t afford to stigmatise it when it could affect us all.”

Daisy Buchanan “Abortion legal time limit: Why we feminists owe it to ourselves to not ignore this uncomfortable issue” The Telegraph 03 September 2014

Perhaps abortion is stigmatized so much because people realize it’s the killing of a child?

Share on Facebook

Margaret Sanger: Black Australians are “a step higher than a chimpanzee”

From Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood:

“In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find.

It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than a chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.”

Margaret Sanger “Sexual Impulses: Part II” New York Call December 29, 1912

Black Native Australians, in Sanger’s view, were a lower order of human than white people like herself.

Share on Facebook

Pro-Choice Author: Some Women who have Abortions have “Intimate Relationship” with their Babies

Pro-Choice author Bertha Alvarez Manninen says:

“Some women do feel responsible for the fetus and begin to establish an intimate relationship with it from the moment they discover their pregnancy. Indeed, some women feel this way even toward a fetus they plan on aborting.”

Bertha Alvarez Manninen Pro-Life, Pro-Choice: Shared Values in the Abortion Debate (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014) 50-51

Go here to see what a baby looks like after an abortion. 

Share on Facebook

Head of Chain of Abortion Clinics: Some Women are “Devastated” by their Abortions

Clare Murphy, a spokesperson for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, a chain of abortion clinics, says there is “not a jot of evidence” that women suffer post-abortion trauma.

But she says:

“There will of course be women who, even if they do not regret their decision, feel devastated that this was a decision they had to take in the first place.”

Radhika Sanghani “The harsh truth about how women feel after an abortion” The Telegraph 14 July 2015

Share on Facebook

Suicide was rare among pregnant women before abortion was legalized

Before Roe vs. Wade, women could often get permission for an abortion if they claimed they were suicidal. Because abortions were legal to save a woman’s life, many doctors took the threat of suicide as a risk to a woman’s life, meaning an abortion would be legal.

The woman generally had to see a psychiatrist and have him write down that she would kill herself if she wasn’t granted an abortion.

However, suicides among pregnant women were extremely rare. One researcher says:

“In 1964, Dr. Russell S Fisher, Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Maryland, wrote that he could “recall only one pregnancy among the last 700 suicides, although some pregnancies may have been missed since we do not do an autopsy when the manner and the cause of death are established.”

H Rosen “Psychiatric Implications of Abortion” Western Reserve Law Review 17 (1965) 445, cited in David Granfield The Abortion Decision (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1971) 100

More recent studies have found that the suicide rate in women who had abortions is higher than among women who hadn’t.

Share on Facebook

Pro-life authors: abortion illustrates lack of compassion for poor children

Pro-life authors Terry Schlossberg and Elizabeth Achtemeier wrote:

“We often hear the argument in our society that it is far better for some children to be aborted than to be born into a situation where they are unwanted or where they will be abused and perhaps starved to death.

But the implications of that argument is that we autonomous individuals, who make up our society, will take no responsibility for such children. They are not our problem. They would upset our lifestyle and plans.

They would interfere with our independence and well-being. And so better to kill them in the womb than to let them come forth into light.

As one church woman remarked, “Maybe you want to raise all those unwanted babies. I don’t. That’s why I’m pro-choice.”

When it comes to the question of abortion, our autonomous individualism has turned us all into a nation of independent selves, with no communal obligations and with no responsibilities toward one another.”

Terry Schlossberg and Elizabeth Achtemeier Not My Own: Abortion & the Marks of the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995) 10-11

Share on Facebook

Pro-choice author: “fetal images” changed abortion debate

Pro-choice author Johanna Schoen wrote:

“If many viewed abortion in the 1970s as central to women’s emancipation and a right that women should have, this view began to change in the 1980s as the proliferation of fetal images began to contribute to a reshaping of the public understanding of the fetus.

As fetal images gained in prominence, antiabortion activists began to articulate fetal interests and rights and to advance the notion that a fetus might have interests that stand in opposition to the interests of the woman carrying the fetus.”

Johanna Schoen Abortion after Roe (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University Of North Carolina Press, 2015) 15

Share on Facebook

Reasons for abortion in Canada

Here are the reasons why some women had abortions in Canada. The sample was of women referred from a birth control center in Toronto to abortion facilities. The year was 1981.

Reasons Given

Personal choice: 12.2%

Still a student, too young: 34.7%

Emotionally unable to have a child: 14.3%

Financially unable to have a child: 34.7%

Fear of birth defects: 2%

Maternal health: 0%

Rape: 2%

Incest: 0%

A third of the women had a previous abortion and over half were not using contraception when they got pregnant.

Bruce Alton The Abortion Question (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1983) 15

The research was done by MG Powell and RB Deber.

Share on Facebook

Abortion clinic director: if I had a gun, I’d shoot pro-lifers

Kristina is the director of a chain of abortion facilities. After Dr. George Tiller’s murder, other abortion workers urged her to get a gun. In an interview for a pro-abortion book, she said:

“They wanted me to get a gun, but I would probably shoot one of the protesters, and I’d be in jail. So I don’t want to have a gun.”

David S Cohen and Krysten Connon Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Antiabortion Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) 26

Share on Facebook

Pro-choice writer complains about ultrasounds

Pro-choice writer Lisa M Mitchell complains about how ultrasounds reveal preborn babies:

“Struggles over the meanings of personhood have implications for other persons, and I’m interested in the ramifications of “seeing” into women and “seeing” particular fetuses…

To what extent is [ultrasound] disempowering, subjecting women, fetuses, men, and sonographers to a normalizing gaze?…

What has been the evidentiary status of fetal images in the struggle over abortion rights?”

Lisa M Mitchell Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2001) 12

Mitchell is so out of touch that she puts the word “seeing” in quotes, as if she can’t quite accept that we can actually see a preborn baby.

One wonders how many women, going in for an ultrasound and seeing their baby on the screen, feel that the ultrasound was “disempowering.”

Share on Facebook