Cowardice asks the question, ‘is it safe?’; expediency asks the question, ‘is it politic?’; vanity asks the question, ‘is it popular?’; but conscience asks the question, ‘is it right?’; and there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but because conscience tells one it is right.
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Baptist minister and leader of the American civil rights movement
“Abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.”
– 1963 pamphlet by Planned Parenthood
Today Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the United States
“To accept the fact that, after fertilization has taken place, a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical conception. It is plain experimental evidence.”
– Dr. Jerome Lejeune(b. 1926) French geneticist and recipient of the Kennedy Prize and the William Allen Memorial Medal for his discovery of the genetic basis of Down’s syndrome
“In medical practice, there are few surgical procedures given so little attention and so underrated in its potential hazard as abortion.”
– Dr. Warren Hern, MD Abortion practitioner and author of Abortion Practice (1990), the textbook most widely used in the United States to teach abortion to medical personnel
“Probably nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about the fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something that I have an easy answer on how to cure.”
– Harrison Hickman, pollster for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, addressing NARAL’s 20th Anniversary Conference
“Paradoxically, I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about… doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby.”
– New Mexico abortionist, American Medical News, July 12, 1993
“Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the ideal of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not put forth under socially impeccable auspices.”
– Editorial “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society” California Medicine , September 1970
“Today… the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion… because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for me to kill you and you to kill me – there is nothing in between. ”
– Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997)
“It moves one’s heart to think: Nine months before I was born there was a woman who loved me deeply. She did not know what I was going to be like, but she loved me because she carried me in her womb. And when she gave me birth, she took me in her arms, because her love was not just beginning – she conceived it along with me. A mother loves – and that is why abortion is so abhorrent…”
– Oscar Romero(1917-1980), Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador and human rights leader murdered in 1980 by right-wing death squad
“The solution [to a crisis pregnancy] is not to kill the innocent baby but to deal with the mother’s values and her attitudes toward life.”
– Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1977 March for Life, Washington, DC
“We think abortion is a bad thing.”
– Kate Michelman, Executive Director of NARAL, in a 1993 interview with thePhiladelphia Inquirer (Michelman complained she was misquoted, until she was reminded that the interview had been taped)
“My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.”
– Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.”
– Victoria Woodhull,the first female presidential candidate in the United States
“When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton(1815-1902) Organizer of the first women’s rights convention in the United States; leader in the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“It is a pity that…the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of “Me Decade” possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.”
– Christopher Hitchens, Socialist writer The Nation, 1989
“Abortion is not a sign that women are free, but a sign that they are desperate.”
– Frederica Mathewes-Green, contemporary writer and National Public Radio commentator
“Child murderers practice their profession without let or hinderance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned… Is there no remedy for all this ante-natal child murder?… Perhaps there will come a time when…an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood…and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with.”
– Sarah Norton, early American feminist leader
“The crowning insult [of abortion] is that this ordeal is represented to her as some kind of a privilege.Her sad and onerous duty is garbed in the rhetoric of a civil right.”
– Germaine Greer, British feminist and author of The Whole Woman (1999)
“The level of moral hypocrisy that we have required ourselves to live with in order to make abortion legal is much more evident to me now, as it must be to anyone who is genuinely willing to look at it.”
– Cynthia Gorney, Oakland pro-choice journalist and author of Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars, in a July 17, 1998 interview with the East Bay Express
“So what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex, REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere “uterine material”? How can we charge that it is vile and repulsive for pro-lifers to brandish vile and repulsive images if the images are real? To insist that the truth is in poor taste is the very height of hypocrisy. Besides, if these images are often the facts of the matter, and if we then claim that it is offensive for pro-choice women to be confronted by them, then we are making the judgment that women are too inherently weak to face a truth about which they have to make a grave decision. This view of women is unworthy of feminism. Free women must be strong women, too; and strong women, presumably, do not seek to cloak their most important decisions in euphemism.”
– Naomi Wolfe, pro-choice feminist, in the October 16,1995 edition of The New Republic (“Our Bodies, Our Souls: Rethinking Pro-choice Rhetoric”)
“It seems to be as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.”
– Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948) Hindu religious and human rights leader in India who advocated peaceful civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws
“Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”
– Alice Paul, author of the original Equal Rights Amendment (1923) who opposed the later trend of linking the E.R.A. with abortion rights
“I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution, and not of moral or religious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people of Missouri, but let them settle that matter for themselves. I hold that the people of the slaveholding States are civilized men as well as ourselves, that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity and not to us. It is for them to decide therefore the moral and religious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits.”
– Stephen A. Douglas, 1858 Democratic presidential candidate who, in 1854, pushed the Kansas Nebraska Act through Congress, opening the remaining U.S. territories to slavery. Douglas used the above reasoning to justify his position that if the people “want slavery, they shall have it; if they prohibit slavery, it shall be prohibited.”
“The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amounts to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder…”
– Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
Noted civil rights activist, founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and participant in founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus.
“We’re living in an age of genocide. …And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program….of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide…. [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.”
– Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
American advocate for justice and peace; founded the Catholic Worker Movement.
“These days contraception is abortion, because the third generation pills cannot be shown to prevent sperm fertilizing an ovum… Intra-uterine devices, medicated or not, work by creating inflammation of the uterus, often accompanied by infection; women who accepted them as contraceptive devices were actually being equipped with a do-it-yourself abortionist’s tool. The outcome was frequent occult abortion, heavy bleeding and pelvic inflammatory disease, with the accompanying elevated risk of ectopic pregnancy… Whether you feel that the creation and wastage of so many embryos is an important issue or not, you must see that the cynical deception of millions of women by selling abortifacients as if they were contraceptives is incompatible with the respect due to women as human beings. You must also see that expecting women to be grateful for the opportunity to have inserted into their bodies instruments for sucking and scraping out the products of avoidable conception shows them as much contempt… What women don’t know does hurt them. If we ask ourselves whether we would have any hope of imposing upon men the duty to protect women’s fertility and their health, and avoid the abortions that occur in their uncounted millions every day, we will see in a blinding light how unfree women are.”
– Germaine Greer, British feminist and author of The Whole Woman (1999)