They said it.
Peg Johnston, director of Southern Tier Women’s Services abortion clinic near Binghamton, New York, offers women a polished stone as a “memento” of her abortion. She also discusses Native American and Buddhist rituals with the women. According to Johnston:
‘There is no Hallmark card for you, but it doesn’t mean you can’t honor your loss.”
Ms. Magazine in their article, Abortion under attack (August-September, 2001)
Quoted by Life Dynamics.
“Rather than trying to cozy up to the forced-birth camp, women who value their freedom should be proud to say that they like abortion. In fact, they should venerate it whole-heartedly. Abortion is our last refuge, the one final, definitive instrument that secures our bodily autonomy. What’s not to love?”
Jessica DelBalzo “I Love Abortion: Implying Otherwise Accomplishes Nothing for Women’s Rights” RH Reality Check, March 14, 2012. can be found here
Pro-Choice politician John Crystal defends abortion in the following manner:
“If there’s anything that bothers me, it’s people trying to force their judgments on someone else. And that’s what this is – a right to privacy issue. The rights of people to have their own personal and religious beliefs.”
quoted in Roger Rosenblatt Life Itself: Abortion In The American Mind. (New York: Random House, 1992) 168
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“I would like to add another reason to love abortion. As a provider and counselor, I find that it is one of those rare events when you are allowed–demanded–to step back and look at your life. Affirm it, question it, change it, tweak it. Whatever. It gives women the opportunity, if they want it, to understand themselves as agents of their lives. There can be a lot of knowledge and wisdom that comes from such life defining experiences and it should be celebrated.”
Abortion provider Peg Johnston in a comment to a blog post that can be found here.
“Many “pro-lifers” are really pro-sperm. Basically, they insist that the sperm has an inalienable right to try to get to the egg.”
David Morris, “The Pro-Life Continuum,” AlterNet (December 19, 2005)
William Martin. What Liberals Believe. (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008)
“Being pro-choice is an expression of our deepest held moral values.”
George A. Hill and Nancy Mosher, “Pro-Choice Supporters Not Ceding Anything,” Maine Today (January 25, 2005)
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
Florynce Kennedy, quoted in “the Verbal Karate of Florynce Kennedy, Esq.” Ms. Magazine (March 1973)
“The condition of unwantedness also makes it probable that the child will be poorly cared for, economically, physically, and psychologically.… Abortion for the children’s sake – this is paradoxical but true.”
Abortion Hearings (Senate) 2, PP 588 – 589 (Statement of Garrett Hardin); Garrett Hardin, Mandatory Motherhood: the True Meaning of “Right to Life” (Boston: Beacon, 1974) PP 98 – 100
This characterization of abortion as being best for the child is similar to some of the arguments against slavery that claimed that African-Americans were better off as slaves and that slavery was, therefore, an act of kindness towards them. Here are some examples:
Thomas Jefferson justified his ownership of slaves. In the 1953 book the Constitutional Principles of Thomas Jefferson, Caleb Perry Patterson said the following:
“….It was Jefferson’s humane feeling for his slaves they kept him from freeing them. To free the ordinary slave was not very different from starting him on the road to starvation. Or as Jefferson put it…Like abandoning children.”
Quoted in Gregg Cunningham “Abortion Is a Form of Genocide” Mary E Williams. Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, 2002)
also from that article:
Author Merrill D Peterson, in Thomas Jefferson And the New Nation
“…To turn loose the mass of slaves would have been, in his [Jefferon’s] eyes, an act of heartless cruelty.”
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“What women know is that bringing an unwanted child into the world is the beginning of death not life. Legislation, then, that will compel them to give birth to unwanted children is not pro-life, but pro-death.”
Joy MK Bussert, Minnesota Council of Churches, 1982. Quoted in Bonnie Szumski , Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (St. Paul, Minnesota: Greenhaven Press, 1986)
“What happens even to the well baby born to a scared, unmarried teenage girl, herself virtually a child? What happens to the child born into abysmal poverty or into a family already too large? Or to the child born to a sick or disturbed mother? Although it is certainly not inevitable that the child unwanted at birth will be rejected and unloved in life, research into the etiology of mental illness, criminality, and mental retardation has singled out parental deprivation as perhaps the most important single causal factor.”
Abortion Hearings (Senate) 2, PP 588 – 589 (Statement of Garrett Hardin); Garrett Hardin, Mandatory Motherhood: the True Meaning of “Right to Life” (Boston: Beacon, 1974) PP 98 – 100
