They said it.
Author Brent Elisens, who supports legalized abortion, wrote:
“… Kids are obnoxious, stop loud, obstinate, and because of your votes and professional outrage at everything, you can’t put your hands on them. They’re smart, they know that… I have one son and I regret having him. Not him but having a child at all.”
Brent Elisens The Adoption Option With a Portion of Abortion (2021)
Share on FacebookA pro-choice author wrote the following in an introduction to her book on abortion, published in 2014:
“I focus on the concerns of women who either have obtained abortions or support women’s ability to choose to do so, and yet regard fetuses as deserving of respect.
This sentiment is increasingly prevalent among the younger pro-choice generation, and it is vital that the pro-choice community defend abortion in a manner that will resonate with them.
Contrary to the worry that doing so will adversely affect abortion rights, the unwillingness to humanize the fetus is turning people away from the pro-choice community.”
Bertha Alvarez Manninen Pro-Life, Pro-Choice: Shared Values in the Abortion Debate (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014) 6
A human fetus is human, whether pro-choice activists “humanize” him or not. Manninen’s words show that people are ambivalent about abortion and the status of pre-born babies.
Share on FacebookPro-choice author Rickie Solinger, referring to the fact that the National Right to Life Committee was founded in 1974:
“… By this time, fetal imaging was a routine practice. Being able to “see” and ascribe personhood to the fetus stimulated antiabortion activism.”
Rickie Solinger Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 16
The pro-abortion group the Association for the Study of Abortion sent out a memo in 1972 where they came up with the term “pro-choice” to describe their movement. The memo said:
“A woman’s conscience may well tell her abortion is wrong, but she may choose (and must have the right to choose) to have one anyway for compelling practical reasons…
What we are concerned with is, to repeat, the woman’s right to choose – not with her right (or anyone else’s right) to make a judgment about whether that choice is morally illicit.”
Memorandum of the Association for the Study of Abortion, Jimmye Kimmey “Right to Choose Memorandum,” December 1972
in Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, eds. Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2010)
Share on FacebookIn one of her books, pro-choice author Rickie Solinger wrote about how she thought abortion was “settled” after Roe was decided. She didn’t anticipate the rise of the pro-life movement:
“I was 26 when the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in 1973, and like others of my generation assumed that it had settled the matter.
Perhaps because I was relatively young then, perhaps because the political culture was less divided and divisive, perhaps because the claims of the women’s rights movement seemed so persuasive, I didn’t doubt that Roe v. Wade had established a new order, one that would change women’s lives forever…
[M]any women’s rights activists and others did not foresee the long decades of backlash against women’s new sexual and reproductive freedoms that lay ahead.”
Rickie Solinger Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) xv–xvi
Share on FacebookA British pro-choice politician said in 1979:
“I believe very much in the sanctity of life. I think that is one of the central issues for all of us, whichever side we take on this Bill. I do not want to see a situation in which we have more physically and mentally handicapped children…more unwanted children, with all the social problems that will involve… That is my view of the sanctity of human life.”
Fran Amery Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020) 73
Share on FacebookAuthor Leslie Cannold interviewed pro-choice activists. She recounts one conversation with them. All of the women quoted are pro-abortion:
“The following conversation, between myself, Lisa, Carey, and Lucy, began after I raised the question of medical science’s use of fetal tissue to treat those suffering from Parkinson’s disease:…
Carey: I’m not saying I’d say no, I’m just saying that you have to ask the woman if it’s okay to use the aborted tissue!
Lucy: But if it’s in the rubbish bin, if she’s just thinking it’s going in the bin…
Lisa: But you can’t take it home, can you?
Lucy: You can’t take it home, and they can use it… It has been created especially for science to use.
Carey: I think that is outrageous, absolutely outrageous… Not even asking permission.
Lucy: But still, it’s like they’re taking out your appendix and throwing it in the rubbish. You’re throwing it in the rubbish, you haven’t said you want it all prettied up and put in a nice grave and buried.
Lisa: No way, they can’t just take it.
Lucy: OK, but your actual appendix is diced out, and the fetus is diced out. It’s out of you, it’s not part of you. I mean it’s gone, you’ve chosen to murder. You’ve killed that child, it’s gone.
Lisa: If they’re doing stuff like that, I’m going to start taking my Tupperware container with me.
Carey: Oh, absolutely.
Lucy: So you think you have a right to the fetus, even if you’ve just “tossed it in the bin”?
Carey: The whole handling of the abortion issue is wrong. You don’t toss it in the garbage. I mean, I’ve had an abortion, it was an incredibly painful experience.
I didn’t toss it in the garbage. And I find it really distressing to hear it referred to that way. And that others think they have a right to use my fetus.
You’re saying toss it in the garbage. I didn’t toss it in the garbage.
Lucy: OK, what did you do?
Carey: It sounds very callous and my decision was not a callous one. It was not unthought about, it was not clear, and it certainly wasn’t indifferent.
Part of your abortion decision is that it’s not going to be used as fetal tissue [to treat disease] or anything else. The thing is that if somebody asked me can be used as fetal tissue, I’d probably say yes. But not to ask…”
Leslie Cannold The Abortion Myth (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) 34-35
Share on FacebookKatha Pollitt explained in a 2014 interview why she wrote her pro-abortion book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights:
“I wrote this book because all you have to do is open up the newspaper and see the way things are going. Since, 2010 when the Republicans were so successful there have been 205 new abortion restrictions passed in the states, and, even more than the restrictions- the discourse. You can just feel it shifting. You can feel it shifting toward the anti-abortion side of language and the greater and greater defensiveness of the pro-choice side.”
Quoted in CAROLE NOVIELLI “Pro-Abortion Author Criticizes Planned Parenthood, Says Tide Shifting in Pro-Life Direction” LifeNews NOV 7, 2014
Share on FacebookPro-choice activist and former NARAL president Kate Michelman said in the New York Times in 1988:
“… The antiabortion side has in some ways won the public debate, captured the terms and framed the issues. There is very little discussion these days about how every dimension of a woman’s life is influenced by the right to reproductive freedom. We have to remind people that abortion is the guarantor of a woman’s full right to choose and her right to participate fully in the social and political life of society.”
Tamar Lewin “Legal Abortion under Fierce Attack 15 Years after Roe V Wade Ruling” New York Times May 10, 1988
Share on FacebookPro-choice author Craig C Malborn writes:
“… Abortion is a decision that always involves two lives. When clearly articulated, the need to consider two lives creates the core dilemma in abortion, i.e., placing in competition two lives linked by motherhood. No world religion or tradition can escape confronting the two life dilemma unavoidable in abortion…
We must accept that the issue of abortion by necessity involves two lives, embryonic and maternal. These two lives coexist at vastly different developmental stages. Can these two lives be “valued” as equal?”
Craig C Malborn Abortion in 21st-Century America: A Matter of Life/Lives and/or Death (North Charleston, South Carolina: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2012) 49, 54
His answer is no – the two lives are not equal. But he acknowledges that there are two lives involved, and that abortion destroys a life.
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