They said it.
Australian pro-choice writer Karen Kissane is quoted saying:
“Any woman who has felt a baby stir inside her [and] any man who has seen the tiny heart pulsing on an ultrasound screen knows that abortion is about ending a life.”
Quoted in Leslie Cannold “The Abortion Myth: Feminism, Morality and the Hard Choices Women Make” (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998) p xvii-xviii.
Share on FacebookPro-choice author and creator of the “I had an abortion” T-shirt campaign quoted the following in her book “Abortion & Life”:
“Every woman who is pregnant wonders if she has a bedroom for that child; can she afford to take off the time to raise that child? … When women don’t have jobs or health care, where is the choice? There is nothing worse than a woman aborting a baby she wanted because she couldn’t support it.”
Loretta Ross, a pro-choice activist and national coordinator of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective.
It is very commendable that Ross is advocating for better services for pregnant women and their families. Feminists for Life has been doing that for years, and now, finally, members of the pro-choice community are seeing the need as well, and recognizing that a woman coerced into aborting her baby by life circumstances is a bad thing. However, it is disturbing that Ross has no problem referring to the unborn “fetus” as a “child” and a “baby”- but still finds it acceptable to kill him or her.
Jennifer Baumgardner “Abortion & Life” (New York, NY: Akashic Books, 2008) 67
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Pro-choice author and creator of the “I Had an Abortion” t-shirt project Jennifer Baumgardner describes an incident when she was speaking to a pro-choice group while she herself was pregnant:
“Along those lines, I had my own moment of truth during my fifth month of pregnancy in May 2004. A small moment, but it changed me. I was speaking to a group from Barnard’s College Students for Choice when I referred to the object in one’s uterus when one is pregnant as a “baby.”
A nurse practitioner who was speaking after me interrupted “Fetus, you mean. You said baby, but it’s a fetus.”
“Oh, right,” I stammered, blushing. “Oops.” I felt foolish, caught in an ignorant mistake. Later, though, I realized that I had always thought of my pregnancy as carrying a baby- that was the word I wanted to use- and I was forcing myself to say “fetus” out of fear. …I thought of other phrases that I forced myself to use too, like “so-called partial birth abortion” and “antichoice.” These phrases suddenly struck me as legal jargon, words in the service of arguments that weren’t themselves always meaningful. Suppressing language, policing ourselves so we don’t slip up and say “baby” continues the split between our politics and our lives.”
Jennifer Baumgardner “Abortion & Life” (New York, NY: Akashic Books, 2008) p 59-60
Share on FacebookFrom feminist and pro-choice author Kathleen McDonnell:
“Abortion is in some sense an act of violence, and indisputably results in the termination of a life.”
Kathleen McDonnell “Not An Easy Choice: A Feminist Re-examines Abortion” (Second Story Press) 2003
Share on FacebookFrom the essay “Our Bodies, Our Souls” by feminist author Naomi Wolf OCTOBER 16, 1995 THE NEW REPUBLIC
“It was when I was four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and in the middle of an argument, that I realized I could no longer tolerate the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement. I was being interrogated by a conservative, and the subject of abortion rights came up. “You’re four months pregnant,” he said. “Are you going to tell me that’s not a baby you’re carrying?”
The accepted pro-choice response at such a moment in the conversation is to evade: to move as swiftly as possible to a discussion of “privacy” and “difficult personal decisions” and “choice.” Had I not been so nauseated and so cranky and so weighed down with the physical gravity of what was going on inside me, I might not have told what is the truth for me. “Of course it’s a baby,” I snapped. And went rashly on: “And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God.”
Startlingly to me, two things happened: the conservative was quiet, I had said something that actually made sense to him. And I felt the great relief that is the grace of long-delayed honesty.”
To read the essay in its entirety, go here
Share on FacebookCuriously, former Planned Parenthood president Faye Wattleton admits that the unborn are alive in her book:
“There are many sperm cells in the [seminal] fluid. If one of them meet an egg cell inside the mother, new life can begin to grow… if one of your friends is pregnant, ask her to let your child feel the baby move… a baby grows in a special place inside the mother, called the uterus — not in her stomach. In nine months, it is born…”
Faye Wattleton, “How to Talk to your child about Sexuality” (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Inc., 1986
Share on Facebook“We – in the states – have dealt heavily, up to now, in euphemism. I think one of the reasons why the “good guys” – the people in favor of abortion rights – lost a lot of ground is that we have been unwilling to talk to women about what it means to abort a baby.
We don’t ever talk about babies, we don’t ever talk about what is being decided in abortion. We never talk about responsibility. The word “choice” is the biggest euphemism.
Some use the phrases “products of conception” and “contents of the uterus,” or exchange the word “pregnancy” for the word “fetus.” I think this is a mistake tactically and strategically, and I think it’s wrong…
It is morally and ethically wrong to do abortions without acknowledging what it means to do them.
I performed abortions, I have had an abortion and I am in favor of women having abortions when we choose to do so.
But we should never disregard the fact that being pregnant means there is a baby growing inside of a woman, a baby whose life is ended. We ought not to pretend this is not happening.”
Judith Arcana “Feminist Politics and Abortion in the US” Pro-Choice Forum (Psychology and Reproductive Choice) Sponsored by The Society for the Psychology of Women. here
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“Women are not stupid … women have always known that there was a life there.”
Faye Wattleton, then President of Planned Parenthood
Donahue, May 15, 1989, Transcript #3288 NBC
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