They said it.
“Pro-choice is about choosing life. And it is moral.”
From “Pro-Prayer, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice” by Reverend Julia Mayo Quinlan, who is pastor of the Chinese Methodist Church in New York. She addressed a service commemorating the 23rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice:
From a sermon called “Faithful Witnesses for Choice” by the Reverend Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragdale delivered to the National Abortion Federation at their annual meeting in 1997:
“We are pro-choice because we are for women, and men, and children, and families who struggle to be faithful to God’s will for them in the face of the very real complexities of their lives. We are pro-choice not because we know that the decisions they make will always be the right ones, but that we understand that that is something that we never can know. So we leave the outcome in God’s hands, and in the meantime, we provide the women who turn to us with every resource at our disposal to help them make and act on the difficult choices they face. Women making these decisions need to know that they have our respect, that we honor and celebrate them for making and acting on and living with complicated ethical decisions. They need to know that we are prayerfully pro-choice.”
From a speech to the California Republican League on September 26, 1998 by Reverend Ann Hayman:
“What are our deepest values? How do we feel about an ideological shift that makes a fetus a patient and a person? Nowhere in Scripture either Hebrew or Christian are any such claims made.”
From pro-choice Reverend Bernice Powell Jackson, from the speech “Seeing the World Through Women’s Eyes” delivered on September 18, 1995 to the annual meeting of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
“We say no to violence – all violence – clinic violence, domestic violence, drive-by violence….We say a woman’s right to make all the choices about her own life and those of her family is a fundamental human right that most Americans believe in.”
From pro-choice Reverend Bernice Powell Jackson, from the speech “Seeing the World Through Women’s Eyes” delivered on September 18, 1995 to the annual meeting of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice:
Share on FacebookReverend Howard Moody, who created a coalition of pro-choice clergy members who referred women to illegal abortion practitioners before Roe v. Wade. He and his organization were responsible for arranging tens of thousands of abortions. From the speech “The Unfinished Revolution of Pro-Choice: Beyond Sound-Bites and Slogans””
“My understanding of free choice is that the right to choose is a God-given right with which persons are endowed. Without choice, life becomes a meaningless routine and humans become robots. Freedom of choice is what makes us human and responsible. And for women, the preeminent freedom is the choice to control her reproductive process. Any theological or moral arguments that subordinate a woman’s freedom to the imaginary screams of a fetus… will be less than human, no matter how much talk there is about the preciousness of life….there is no law so oppressive and no economic policy so dehumanizing as that which consigns a woman, because she is poor, to involuntary servitude on behalf of an unwanted burden for unnumbered years of her life.”
This speech was given at the annual meeting of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice on September 17, 1997
Rev. Karen Vannoy pastor , Travis Park United Methodist Church, on their pro-choice stand:
“I am willing,to take whatever heat would be generated by my support of what I think is right and in God’s will.”
Vannoy is a member of the local Planned Parenthood board.
Christianity has always emphasized the importance of responsible decision making, and nothing is more important than the decision of when, or whether, to have children …. one thing I know from the Bible is that Jesus was not against women having a choice in continuing a pregnancy…Jesus was for peace on earth, justice on earth, compassion on earth, mercy on earth, and choice on earth.”
Excerpts from the November 22, 2002 letter by Mark Bigelow, Congregational Church of Huntington, United Church of Christ, Centerport, New York, board member of Planned Parenthood of the Hudson-Peconic and a member of the PPFA Clergy Advisory Board, to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor.”
Rev. Betty Bone Schiess Episcopal Church Priest
“It’s a spiritual rape to deny a woman the right to make a moral and ethical decision, from our tradition, we deeply respect the fact that every member of our faith has the right to make this ethical choice. It’s clearly a violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees men the right to be conscientious objectors during war.”
The Post-Standard, 300,000 Rally for ‘Choice’ leaders claim majority on abortion issue:4-10-1989
“…I wanted to express calmly, eloquently, that pro-choice people understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion — one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus) — but that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right….”
Anne Lamott, “The Rights of the Born”, Los Angeles Times (Feb. 10,2006)
This article that defends abortion can be found here.
Share on FacebookFrom legal abortion advocate David Boonan:
“Perhaps the most straightforward relation between you and me on the one hand and every human fetus from conception onward on the other is this: all are living members of the same species, Homo sapiens. A human fetus, after all, is simply a human being at a very early stage in her his or her development.”
David Boonan. A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press: New York), P 20. Quoted in on Abortion. (Signal Hill, CA: Stand to Reason, 2008) page 68
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