Abortion Support Quotes

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The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy.
Sonya Renee Taylor
I certainly supported a woman's right to choose, but to my mind the time to choose was before, not after the fact.
Ann B. Ross (Miss Julia Throws a Wedding (Miss Julia, #3))
Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last 'trick', whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school. 'But how?' we ask. Then the voice says, 'They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.' There they are. There *we* are - the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.
Brennan Manning (The Ragamuffin Gospel)
I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no ‘good’ abortions and ‘bad’ abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
The Nazis are not justified by saying, Don't you know that there is more than just the issue of the Jews? The issues are more complex than that! What of the poor in this country, who cannot afford housing? What about the sick and malnourished? Don't you care about these people? Don't you claim to be a follower of Jesus?! Supporting a murderous political agenda with such an argument is tragic! And what do we know about Obama? He is the single most anti-life proponent that has ever run for the office of president.
Joseph Bayly
Opponents and supporters of abortion rights may find fault with my proposal that a pineal DMT release at forty-nine days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus.
Rick Strassman (DMT: The Spirit Molecule)
The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media will only refer to partial birth abortion as 'what its opponents refer to as partial birth abortions.' What do its supporters call it? Casual Fridays? Bean-with-bacon potato chip dip? Uh . . . Steve?
Ann Coulter (Godless: The Church of Liberalism)
Each party has a platform--a pre-fixed menu of beliefs making up its worldview. The candidate can choose one of the two platforms, but remember: no substitutions. For example, do you support healthcare? Then you must also want a ban on assault weapons. Pro limited government? Congratulations, you are also anti-abortion. Luckily, all human opinion falls neatly into one of the two clearly defined camps. Thus, the two-party system elegantly represents the bi-chromatic rainbow that is American political thought.
Jon Stewart (America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction)
The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding...
Flannery O'Connor
Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visable in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.
Joseph Bernardin
The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level.
Nancy R. Pearcey (Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning)
I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers’ holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They’re the new Puritans, as far as I’m concerned, people who believe that if you don’t think the way they do, you’re going to hell
Stephen King (Insomnia)
Many of those who accuse the Christian God of being a “genocidal god” because of the Flood, support the genocidal killing of millions of children in their mother’s wombs, which is a double standard fallacy!
Ken Ham (A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter)
A culture that treats women as objects, that gleefully supports entertainment that is more often demeaning toward women than it is not, that encourages the erosion of a woman’s autonomy and personal space, is the same culture that elects state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation. Or is it that state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation encourage their constituents to treat women as objects? Perhaps this is trickle-down misogyny—which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist: Essays)
Ohio, lawmakers have taken money from TANF, the welfare program that supports poor families, and given it to so-called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) whose mission is to discourage pregnant women from having abortions. (That’s right: Embryos and fetuses deserve government support, not the actual, living children they may become.)
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months. This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.
Jon Krakauer
Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus--that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and--most striking of all--his beliefs were not ours. Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.
Bart D. Ehrman (Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth)
A large part of carrying the Word of God to full term in your life is surrounding yourself with the right kind of support. Too often within your relationship constellation you are exposed to people who have what I call an “abortive spirit”—they have a way of killing your vision, destroying your passion, undermining your sense of direction and identity,
Cindy Trimm (PUSH: Persevere Until Success Happens Through Prayer)
With new Supreme Court appointments during the ensuing decade, the margin of support within the Court for maintaining the right to abortion appeared to shrink to the vanishing point.
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.” The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP embraced the Christian Right and adopted increasingly pro-evangelical positions, including opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and, later, opposition to gay marriage.
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.
Forrest J. Ackerman
You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.
Chila Woychik (On Being a Rat and Other Observations)
And what if she doesn't want to tell her story? What if it's too personal, too painful? What do these confessions really do? Some people will be moved, but those are rarely the same people who support legislation to erode reproductive freedom. Immovable people will not moved by testimony. Her story becomes an emotional spectacle, something for people to consider, briefly, before moving on to the next sad story. There is no shortage of sad stories when it comes to women and their reproductive lives.
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist)
...'Pro-life' encodes too much propaganda for me: that a fertilized egg is a life in the same sense that a woman is, that it has a right to life as she does, that outlawing abortion saves lives, that abortion is the chief threat to 'life' today, and that the movement to ban abortion is motivated solely by these concerns and not also by the wish to restrict sexual freedom, enforce sectarian religious views on a pluralistic society, and return women t traditional roles. It also suggests that those who support legal abortion are pro-death, which is absurd.
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
Christians can disagree about public policy in good faith, and a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim to be living out the gospel. But the Christian libertarian has a particular obligation to recognize those places where libertarianism’s emphasis on freedom can shade into an un-Christian worship of the individual. Likewise the Christian liberal: even as he supports government interventions to assist the poor and dispossessed, he should be constantly on guard against the tendency to deify Leviathan and wary of the ways that government power can easily be turned to inhuman and immoral ends. In the contemporary United States, a host of factors—from the salience of issues like abortion to the anti-Christian biases of our largely left-wing intelligentsia—ensure that many orthodox Christians feel more comfortable affiliating with the Republican Party than with the Democrats. But this comfort should not blind Christians to the GOP’s flaws.
Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
Western interest in “other” women seems highly selective—and, in some cases, only tenuously connected to feminism. George W. Bush notoriously supported the contemporaneous war on US women’s access to abortion and contraception. He rarely used his platform to criticize harmful traditional practices that affect U.S. women.
Serene J. Khader (Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Studies in Feminist Philosophy))
More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.
Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
What you love defines you better than what you hate. What you need defines you better than what you want. What you give defines you better than what you take. What you do defines you better than what you say. What you create defines you better than what you destroy. What you gain defines you better than what you lose. What you heed defines you better than what you ignore. What you help defines you better than what you hinder. What you esteem defines you better than what you dishonor. What you trust defines you better than what you fear. What you grasp defines you better than what you disbelieve. What you hold defines you better than what you release. What you draw defines you better than what you repel. What you face defines you better than what you avoid. What you finish defines you better than what you start. What you admire defines you better than what you despise. What you welcome defines you better than what you shun. What you heal defines you better than what you hurt. What you praise defines you better than what you condemn. What you cherish defines you better than what you disregard. What you appreciate defines you better than what you despise. What you strengthen defines you better than what you weaken. What you encourage defines you better than what you denounce. What you support defines you better than what you oppose. What you honor defines you better than what you violate. What you consider defines you better than what you ignore. What you accept defines you better than what you reject. What you conceive defines you better than what you abort. What you comprehend defines you better than what you misunderstand.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Conscience is perhaps, on the evolutionary scale, an illness and intelligence a burden. Man has lost touch with his natural survival instincts. We have not been on the Earth for a long time and it may be that, from life’s point of view, or Gaïa’s, we are a failed species, an abortive experiment; and that, especially by destroying the ecosystem that supports it, the suicidal human race is hastening its own disappearance.
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
The pro-life movement pledged its support, however reluctantly. In return it got a leader who put up a better fight during debates against abortion than any other presidential nominee in history. In the final debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump left her struggling to respond when he said of her opposition to any restriction on abortion, “Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”33
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
There’s overwhelming evidence about what happens when these rights are denied. Texas has defunded Planned Parenthood and refused to expand Medicaid, and maternal mortality doubled between 2010 and 2014. That’s the worst in the nation, and it’s higher than the rate in many developing countries. Six hundred women have died in Texas—not from abortions, but from trying to give birth. The number of Texas teenagers having abortions actually increased when support for family planning was cut. In one county, Gregg, it went up 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
VIRGINIA 1/20/2020: The right to self defense is inalienable from the right to life. Weaken one and the other is devalued. Surrender your arms today and forfeit your life tomorrow. It is by no coincidence that a morally bankrupt man is behind the violation of the 2nd Amendment in the State of Virginia: Governor Northam, a man otherwise known for his support for after birth abortion and the wearing of "black face." someone with a defective moral compass, who does not know the sanctity of life, can't very well be expected to know the value of defending it.
A.E. Samaan
opting to complain, life gives you things to complain about this vicious circle ensures your happiness drought life responds to us according to our actions and belief thus reinforcing those beliefs to no relief there is no first cause—still, break the cycle abide in peaceful Silence or experience an inner hell “others” are often a reflecting mirror shining back revealing to us what loads are left to unstack what are friends for but a means to practice kindness and for fortifying the ego’s belief in disconnectedness people cater to me according to my own nature so they are me—there is no individual self, rest assured tweak your thoughts about her and she then treats you thus all minds are one, and all is illusory, as priorly discussed she is you, and you, her the shroud of separateness shall now henceforth wither look back at your life’s recurring patterns and themes and the façade of the ego will start to crack at the seams untranscended mindsets follow wherever we go the common denominator is what your mind has sown that which supports life is automatically supported the get-gain-obtain mentality can be safely aborted
Jarett Sabirsh (Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem)
Personal storytelling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy. This is a long game, but if we can change enough minds, voter suppression will lose its power, gerrymandering will be pointless, the electoral college can’t stop us. If we unleash our stories, destroy the stigma, and manage to create a broad base of unequivocal cultural support for abortion—the foundation of which is already there—then by the time the more ghastly consequences of abortion bans begin to creep up on politicians, we will have the communication tools to act as an enraged critical mass.
Lindy West (The Witches are Coming)
Some people are happy to give feminists credit for things they fear—like abortion rights, contraception for teenagers, or gay liberation—but less willing to acknowledge that feminist activism brought about things they support, like better treatment for breast cancer or the opportunity for young girls to play soccer as well as lead cheers. As Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon observe, "Although the word 'feminist' has become a pejorative term for to some American women, most women (and most men as well) support a feminist program: equal education, equal pay, child care, freedom from harassment and violence," and so on.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History)
We think we value mothers in America, but we don’t. We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why’d they have kids if they couldn’t support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies: Don’t they know how annoying they are, with their yoga, their catfights over diapers and breastfeeding, their designer strollers that take up half the sidewalk so that people with important places to go have to take several extra steps?
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
As members of the Christian right, we had dominated Republican politics throughout the decade, but we realized after Clinton was acquitted that our power and our values did not seem to be a part of any broad consensus. It seemed inevitable after the Lewinsky scandal surfaced that Clinton would be defeated, and yet he was more popular than ever, abortion was still generally accepted, and gays had made great strides into the mainstream. What had we done wrong? What did we not understand? “What has alarmed me throughout this episode,” James Dobson wrote to his supporters, “has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior, even as they suspected, and later knew, that he was lying. I am left to conclude that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It’s with the people of this land.
Rob Schenck (Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister's Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love)
Wealthy queers support initiatives that lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then off-load reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers, who are predominantly women of color whose employment is often directly tied to their citizenship status. The politics of "leaning in" for a small layer of wealthy women has dovetailed with budget cuts and health care rollbacks that have left poor women at the mercy of misogynist, increasingly lethal anti-reproductive-rights legislation, and left poor, queer and trans* people without access to necessary medical resources like hormones or AIDS medication. Original pamphlet: Who is Oakland. April 2012. Quoted in: Dangerous Allies. Taking Sides.
Tipu's Tiger
By 1980 the bipartisan consensus on women—that the laws should not discriminate on grounds of sex and that qualified women should be allowed to compete for jobs at every level—had seriously unraveled. There was no more room for good-government Republicans to agree to disagree on matters such as the Equal Rights Amendment while well-heeled women such as Anne Armstrong and Pat Lindh “nagged” long-suffering men in the White House for a token appointment here and there. At its 1980 convention, the Republican Party, firmly in the hands of the conservative wing, and about to nominate Ronald Reagan, repudiated its support for the Equal Rights Amendment and allied itself publicly with the opponents of women’s abortion rights. Polling revealed that women were starting to peel off from the Grand Old Party. Four years later, the gender gap, wherein women disproportionately support the Democratic candidate and men the Republican, would emerge as a constant in American politics.
Linda R. Hirshman (Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World)
Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism, and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed. Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it's good for everyone if women only have the children they want and can raise them well. Society benefits when women can commit to education and work and dreams without having at the back of their mind a concern that maybe it's all provisional, because at any moment an accidental pregnancy could derail them for life. It's good for children to be wanted, and to come into this life when their parents are ready for them. It's good for people to be able to have sexual experiences and know that birth-control failure need not be the last word. It would not make us a better country if more girls and women were nudged and bullied and cajoled and humiliated and frightened into bearing children they are ill-equipped to raise, even if more men could somehow be lassoed into marrying or supporting them. It would simply mean more lost hope, more bad marriages and family misery, more poverty and struggle for women, their partners, and their kids. Don't we have way too much of all that already?
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
It was as if we had made something very simple incredibly complicated. Here were these bodies, ready to reproduce, controlled against reproduction, then stimulated for an eventual reproduction that was put on ice. My friends who wanted to prolong their fertility did so, now that they were in their thirties and professionally successful, because circumstances in their lives had not lined up as planned. They had excelled at their jobs. They had nice apartments and enough money to comfortably start a family, but they lacked a domestic companion who would provide the necessary genetic material, lifelong support, and love. They wanted to be the parents they had grown up under, but love couldn't be engineered, and ovaries could. Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of goals and outcomes, which reduced structural, economic and technological change to individual decision. "The right to choose"―the right to birth control and abortion services―is different from the idea of choice I mean here. I mean that the baby question justified a fiction that one had to conform one's life to a uniform box by a certain deadline. If the choice were only to have a baby or not, then anybody who wanted a baby and was physically able would simply have one (as many people did), but what I saw with my friends was that it wasn’t actually about the choice of having a baby but of setting up a nuclear family, which unfortunately could not, unlike making a baby, happen more or less by fiat.
Emily Witt (Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love)
The accusation against the Church for being either right or left wing tells you more about the contemporary political assumptions than about the political inclination of Catholicism. The Church will seem both "right wing" (in promoting the traditional family, opposing abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, etc.) and "left wing" (in advocating the rights of minorities, social justice, active state support for the poorest, etc.), depending on the political bias of the one accusing .The same bias afflicts Catholics. There are pro-life Catholics who think Catholic social teaching is "socialist," and pro-social-justice Catholics who think pro-life causes are right wing. The Church will always be accused of "interfering" or trying to "impose" its view when the critic disagrees with its stance; but the same critic will say nothing when the Church has intervened politically on a matter with which he or she agrees. And if the Church has stayed silent, the critic will accuse it of "failing to speak out." Put another way, people are against the Church "interfering" in what they would much rather have left alone; and in favor of "interfering" in what they believe should be changed. Why and when does the Church speak out on political questions? The answer is rarely and cautiously, and almost always because it is a matter which touches on the Gospel, on core freedoms and rights (such as the right to life, or to religious freedom), or on core principles of Catholic social teaching. In these cases, the Church not only needs to speak out; it has a duty to do so.
Austen Ivereigh (How to Defend the Faith Without Raising Your Voice: Civil Responses to Catholic Hot Button Issues)
After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
A similar theological—and particularly ecclesiological—logic shapes the Durham Declaration, a manifesto against abortion addressed specifically to the United Methodist Church by a group of United Methodist pastors and theologians. The declaration is addressed not to legislators or the public media but to the community of the faithful. It concludes with a series of pledges, including the following: We pledge, with Cod’s help, to become a church that hospitably provides safe refuge for the so-called “unwanted child” and mother. We will joyfully welcome and generously support—with prayer, friendship, and material resources—both child and mother. This support includes strong encouragement for the biological father to be a father, in deed, to his child.27 No one can make such a pledge lightly. A church that seriously attempted to live out such a commitment would quickly find itself extended to the limits of its resources, and its members would be called upon to make serious personal sacrifices. In other words, it would find itself living as the church envisioned by the New Testament. William H. Willimon tells the story of a group of ministers debating the morality of abortion. One of the ministers argues that abortion is justified in some cases because young teenage girls cannot possibly be expected to raise children by themselves. But a black minister, the pastor of a large African American congregation, takes the other side of the question. “We have young girls who have this happen to them. I have a fourteen year old in my congregation who had a baby last month. We’re going to baptize the child next Sunday,” he added. “Do you really think that she is capable of raising a little baby?” another minister asked. “Of course not,” he replied. No fourteen year old is capable of raising a baby. For that matter, not many thirty year olds are qualified. A baby’s too difficult for any one person to raise by herself.” “So what do you do with babies?” they asked. “Well, we baptize them so that we all raise them together. In the case of that fourteen year old, we have given her baby to a retired couple who have enough time and enough wisdom to raise children. They can then raise the mama along with her baby. That’s the way we do it.”28 Only a church living such a life of disciplined service has the possibility of witnessing credibly to the state against abortion. Here we see the gospel fully embodied in a community that has been so formed by Scripture that the three focal images employed throughout this study can be brought to bear also on our “reading” of the church’s action. Community: the congregation’s assumption of responsibility for a pregnant teenager. Cross: the young girl’s endurance of shame and the physical difficulty of pregnancy, along with the retired couple’s sacrifice of their peace and freedom for the sake of a helpless child. New creation: the promise of baptism, a sign that the destructive power of the world is broken and that this child receives the grace of God and hope for the future.29 There, in microcosm, is the ethic of the New Testament. When the community of God’s people is living in responsive obedience to God’s Word, we will find, again and again, such grace-filled homologies between the story of Scripture and its performance in our midst.
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
How does this tie into the Biblical prophecies concerning the Daughter of Babylon? First, the Daughter of Babylon, as is seen in scripture, will fall because of its treachery in failing to support Israel, leading to the shedding of blood of many Israelites. Jeremiah says about the Daughter of Babylon in 51:49: “Babylon must fall because of Israel’s slain, just as the slain in all the earth have fallen because of Babylon.” Is the second part of this verse a reference to America’s role in leading the world towards acceptable and legalized abortion practices?
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.
Charles H. Ferguson (Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America)
The United States government had no mechanism to punish China for forced abortions, so instead it pummeled UNFPA. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan reduced funding for it. Then George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both eliminated U.S. funding for the agency. Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, led the fight against UNFPA. He’s a good man who genuinely cared about Chinese women and was horrified by coerced abortions. He wasn’t trying to score cheap political points in criticizing UNFPA, since most New Jersey voters had never heard of the agency. This was an issue that Smith genuinely cared about. The reality, though, was that while the Chinese abuses were real, UNFPA was not a party to them. After giving the gold medal to Qian, the UN turned around and became an important brake on Chinese behavior. A State Department fact-finding mission sent to investigate by the George W. Bush administration reported back: “We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China.” In the thirty-two counties in China where UNFPA operates pilot programs, it has reduced abortion rates by 40 percent, to a rate lower than that in the United States.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
Although we were not doing political work as a group, individuals continued their involvement in lesbian politics, sterilization abuse and abortion rights work, Third World Women’s International Women’s Day activities, and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan Little, and Inéz García. During our first summer when membership had dropped off considerably, those of us remaining devoted serious discussion to the possibility of opening a refuge for battered women in a Black community. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective)
I like to thin the woman who ran the clinic would have done that for anyone - that there's a quiet web of women like her (like us, I flatter myself), stretching from pole to pole, ready to give other women a hand. She helped me even though she didn't have to, and I am forever grateful. But I also wonder what made me sound, to her ears, like someone worth trusting, someone it was safe to take a chance on. I certainly wasn't the neediest person calling her clinic. The fact is, I was getting that abortion no matter what. All I had to do was wait two weeks, or have an awkward conversation I did not want to have with my supportive, liberal, well-to-do mother. Privilege means that it's easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.
Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, an outspoken advocate of humane drug laws and abortion rights, as Surgeon General of the United States. The following year, at a United Nations conference on AIDS, Elders caused a scandal by voicing her support of teaching masturbation as part of sex education. It was a perfectly sane message, especially in the context of the AIDS epidemic. But so freighted was Elders’s simple advocacy of independent sexual pleasure, achievable without a partner and with no chance of procreation, that the president who had appointed her asked her to resign. It
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
How does this tie into the Biblical prophecies concerning the Daughter of Babylon? First, the Daughter of Babylon, as is seen in scripture, will fall because of its treachery in failing to support Israel, leading to the shedding of blood of many Israelites. Jeremiah says about the Daughter of Babylon in 51:49: “Babylon must fall because of Israel’s slain, just as the slain in all the earth have fallen because of Babylon.” Is the second part of this verse a reference to America’s role in leading the world towards acceptable and legalized abortion practices? Multiply over forty million abortions worldwide each year by the years since 1973. Over a billion babies in the world have died, in part, because of America’s ‘leadership’ in promoting abortion globally. What a gruesome legacy. Who else better deserves the title of ‘Mother of Abominations’?
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
It appears that when women and men experienced God in affective worship, they were enabled to act with courage and passionate discipline. This was necessary for all Christians, who often lived in precarious situations they could not control. But it was especially necessary for Christian women. Women who were slaves found it excruciatingly difficult to cope with the demands of pagan masters for sexual liaisons; and women in mixed marriages with pagans were no doubt grieved and repelled when their husbands demanded to abort or expose unwanted offspring. So it would not be surprising if Christian women felt liberated—both sexually and as people who rejected killing—when their husbands became believers. 59 At last they could live the church’s teachings with the support of their husbands!
Alan Kreider (The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire)
My body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public and complex as any man's. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision – the first time I asserted, unequivocally: ‘I KNOW THE LIFE I WANT AND THIS IS NOT IT"; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder... The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies... For that reason, we simply MUST talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, and always an impossible decision. Well we're not and it's not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine... My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.
Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
Do not abort your mission because some don't support your mission
Mistah Fab
While some who support abortion in cases when a child is diagnosed with a disability might be motivated by sincere, if misguided, compassion, this worldview is undergirded by the evil logic of abortion, which insists that those in a position of power—in the case of abortion, the doctor and the pregnant mother—get to decide whether another human being’s life is worth living.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Abortion proponents not only refuse to support laws protecting unborn children from discrimination based on race, sex, or disability, but they insist that being permitted to discriminate is a necessary component of “women’s health care,” and they take legal action to ensure that women can continue to choose abortion even for these reasons.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Many abortion-rights supporters insist that they don’t want to be called “pro-abortion.” Rather, they prefer the label “pro-choice.” But in practice, the most vocal supporters of abortion rarely support options that enable expectant mothers to make any choice other than abortion. Since the Supreme Court created a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers across the country have sustained pregnancy-resource centers, sometimes known as crisis-pregnancy centers, to help pregnant mothers in need welcome their babies into the world.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
While abortion supporters attempt to portray pregnancy-resource centers as somehow harming women or limiting their “right” to abortion, in fact they’re merely offering something that abortion groups themselves don’t provide. Compared with 354,871 abortions performed in 2020, Planned Parenthood itself reported that they offered only 8,626 instances of “prenatal care” and 2,667 adoption referrals.69 In other words, for every instance of “prenatal care,” Planned Parenthood clinics performed 41 abortions. For every adoption referral, they performed 133 abortions. Among services Planned Parenthood provided that specifically related to the woman’s pregnancy decision—including abortion, prenatal or miscarriage care, and adoption referrals—abortion made up more than 96 percent.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Planned Parenthood bills itself as “pro-choice” and as a champion of women in need, but in reality the group prioritizes abortion. Pregnancy-resource centers, by contrast, are honest about their opposition to abortion, and they decline to refer women to abortion clinics. But they offer women real support, acknowledging their concerns about pregnancy and parenthood, and seek to meet whatever needs they can—diapers, cribs, car seats, formula, maternity clothes—to help mothers choose life. This service is especially important considering how lack of knowledge about alternatives, not to mention coercion from partners, can play a big role in women having an abortion.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
One 2004 study of women who’d had an abortion found that about two-thirds of them had received no counseling ahead of time, and only 11 percent who did receive counseling said it was adequate. Just 17 percent said they were counseled on abortion alternatives, and about two-thirds reported feeling pressured to choose abortion. A majority said they weren’t sure of their decision at the time they received an abortion.74 Some women obtain an abortion under duress from their partner, whether literal force or other coercion such as financial pressure or threats to leave the relationship.75 According to some surveys, a majority of women who seek abortion do so because of lack of support from a partner.76 “I can’t tell you how many [post-abortive black] women have fallen into my arms in tears because their significant other put a gun to their head or threatened to kill them or had someone escort them into an abortion clinic to keep them there to make them have an abortion,” pro-life leader Catherine Davis, founder of the Restoration Project, told one of us (Alexandra) in a 2020 interview.77
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
In the midst of that suffering, pro-lifers have spent decades working to help women of all races and all social classes, in all types of difficult situations, encouraging them and supporting them so they can avoid abortion and choose life for their unborn children. They do this important work often without praise, yet at every turn they face harsh opposition from abortion businesses and abortion-rights activists, whose hatred of pregnancy-resource centers can be explained only by the reality that they are pro-abortion, not pro-choice.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Rather than denying the humanity of the unborn—which they know is a losing argument—they deny the personhood of the unborn. While some will claim the unborn child is only a “potential life,” these more sophisticated (and in some cases sophistical) supporters of abortion claim the unborn child is only a “potential person.” That is, while they concede that this is a human being, they argue that it isn’t yet a person because it can’t yet engage in personal actions.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Yet many supporters of abortion argue that protecting babies from the violence of abortion is an illegitimate use of government power. They argue that the state may not impose morality on other people, or that it can’t legislate based on “religious” values. They insist that a state that enacts laws protecting unborn babies has somehow exceeded its rightful authority.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Like most supporters of abortion, Rikelman is speaking as though she has no idea where babies come from. But we all know that sex naturally leads to children.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
While every abortion is an unjust act of lethal violence against the unborn child, regardless of the mother’s reasons, there is something startling about the reality that some women choose abortion precisely because of a specific unwanted characteristic of their unborn child. Yet many of the loudest progressive voices who decry sex discrimination and disability discrimination when it comes to adults remain silent when it comes to discrimination against unborn children based on their sex or disability—or worse, they actively support these types of abortions.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
Confronted with the fact that many women choose abortion because they feel they have no other options, pregnancy-resource centers exist to present women with alternatives to abortion and to provide whatever assistance they need to continue their pregnancy, almost all of which is offered at no cost. For some mothers, this might be a pregnancy test or an ultrasound, or counseling to encourage her that motherhood is a worthwhile choice that she’s capable of undertaking. For others, it might be learning the facts about adoption and receiving help in navigating the adoption process. Most pregnancy-resource centers offer women financial or material support that she isn’t receiving from the child’s father or from her own family, support that enables her to feel confident in choosing life.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
In the view of many abortion supporters, the right to abortion is the right to a dead baby.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
For many abortion supporters, that is the aim: allowing mothers and fathers to choose abortion not to avoid the burden of pregnancy or the sacrifices of parenthood but as a means of eliminating their unwanted child from the world.
Ryan T. Anderson (Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing)
In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore.
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
Single-issue voting on abortion makes white evangelicals complicit on a whole range of policies that would be anathema to nineteenth-century evangelical reformers, not to mention the Bible itself. How is a ruthless exclusionary policy toward immigrants and refugees in any way consistent with scriptural mandates to welcome the stranger and treat the foreigner as one of your own? How does environmental destruction and indifference to climate change honor God’s creation? One of evangelicals’ signature issues in the nineteenth century was support for “common schools” because they provided a boost for the children of those less fortunate; Trump’s secretary of education (who professes to be an evangelical) spent her adult life seeking systematically to undermine, if not destroy, public education.
Randall Balmer (Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right)
I seriously wondered, for example, whether Lisa McElhaney had ever been to Leningrad, or Ulster, or North Waghi. Then again, I couldn’t even figure out what she really died of. Her seventeen-year-old body was found in a plastic bag in Columbus, Ohio, in April 1987. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother had tried to get an abortion when pregnant with Lisa, but couldn’t afford it. Lisa was raped as a child, became pregnant and miscarried at age fifteen, was thrown out by her family, became addicted to drugs, and worked in pornography and prostitution to support her habit. Each time she ran afoul of the law and was incarcerated in a home for delinquents, social workers noted on her file that she displayed an eagerness for relationships and was “‘starved for affection.”’ But the system was set up to rehabilitate, not to provide relationships or affection, so Lisa withdrew and “would sit for hours and hours, staring into space.”’ When photographs of her performing sexual acts were discovered by the police, she was subpoenaed to testify in a child-pornography case against Larry Miller, the pornographer. Although Miller was a suspect in her murder, police believed the killer was a client of hers, Rob Roy Baker, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver who had been linked to similar attacks on other prostitutes. When police came to question him, Baker shot himself to death in a house filled with pictures of nude women cut from pornographic magazines. So I would ask myself, did Lisa die of assault? Which assault? The lack of affordable abortion for her mother? The beating from her john? Did she die of the disease called "family" or the disease called "rehabilitation," of poverty or drugs or pornography, of economics or sexual slavery or a broken body? Or a broken spirit? When she stared into space for hours was it because she knew she was in here but had no way of trying to reach anyone in the neighboring cell? Perhaps she died on unknown causes.
Robin Morgan (The Demon Lover)
The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality. If everyone can work harmoniously toward the same outcome (if all feedback loops are serving the same goal), the results can be amazing. The most familiar examples of this harmonization of goals are mobilizations of economies during wartime, or recovery after war or natural disaster. Another example was Sweden’s population policy. During the 1930s, Sweden’s birth rate dropped precipitously, and, like the governments of Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government worried about that. Unlike Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government assessed its goals and those of the population and decided that there was a basis of agreement, not on the size of the family, but on the quality of child care. Every child should be wanted and nurtured. No child should be in material need. Every child should have access to excellent education and health care. These were goals around which the government and the people could align themselves. The resulting policy looked strange during a time of low birth rate, because it included free contraceptives and abortion—because of the principle that every child should be wanted. The policy also included widespread sex education, easier divorce laws, free obstetrical care, support for families in need, and greatly increased investment in education and health care.4 Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important goal than the number of Swedes.
Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
Turns out a woman choosing adoption, even a woman behind bars, gets a lot more support than a woman who needs an abortion or who plans on keeping her baby.
Susan Wiggs (Sugar and Salt (Bella Vista Chronicles, #4))
The explosion At first the crew thought a meteoroid had hit them. As well as the noise of an explosion, the electrics were going haywire and the attitude control thrusters had fired. In fact, a short circuit had ignited some insulation in the Number 2 oxygen tank of the Service Module. The Service Module provided life support, power and other systems to the Command Module, which held the astronauts as they travelled to and from lunar orbit. The Lunar Module was a separate, though connected, craft that would be used to ferry the men to the lunar surface and back. The fire caused a surge in pressure that ruptured the tank, flooding the fuel cell bay with gaseous oxygen. This surge blew the bolts holding on the outer panel, which tore off free and spun into space, damaging a communications antenna. Contact with Earth was lost for 1.8 seconds, until the system automatically switched to another antenna. The shock also ruptured a line from the Number 1 oxygen tank. Two hours later all of the Service Module’s oxygen supply had leaked into the void. As the Command Module’s fuel cells used oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity, it could now only run on battery power. The crew had no option but to shut down the Command Module completely and move into the Lunar Module. They would then use this as a ‘lifeboat’ for the journey back to Earth before rejoining the Command Module for re-entry. As for the mission, the Service Module was so badly damaged that a safe return from a lunar landing was impossible. These men would not be landing on the Moon. 320,000 km from home The Flight Director immediately aborted the mission. Now he just had to get the men home. The quickest way would be a Direct Abort trajectory, using the Service Module engine to essentially reverse the craft. But it was too late:
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
don’t want you to have an abortion.” Gen’s head tips to the side as her mouth snaps shut. She’s watching me closely, eyes narrowed. “You don’t?” “No. I think it’s your choice. If you wanted to, I would support that. But if you’d like to keep the baby, I think you should.” My chest swells with the need to continue. To
Emma Blake (Broken Daddy)
don’t want you to have an abortion.” Gen’s head tips to the side as her mouth snaps shut. She’s watching me closely, eyes narrowed. “You don’t?” “No. I think it’s your choice. If you wanted to, I would support that. But if you’d like to keep the baby, I think you should.” My chest swells with the need to continue. To reassure her I’ll give her and this baby everything they could ever want.
Emma Blake (Broken Daddy)
Arizona used welfare dollars to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp.[14] And then there’s Mississippi. A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, said… that the bill, along with a second anti-abortion bill, are ‘doomed in the Senate’ and ‘extreme.’ ”73 Thus, for the Democrat Party, saving a born baby’s life is “extreme.” Thus, the party that promoted eugenics in the last century supports infanticide today.
Mark R. Levin (The Democrat Party Hates America)
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HeartSupport (Annual Report of Program Activities: Fiscal Year 1982 (Classic Reprint))
By the time Citizens United’s case reached the federal court system, however, there were signs that the Supreme Court might be willing to soften its position on direct corporate expenditures. In its 2007 opinion in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (551 U.S. 449), the Court carved out some significant exemptions that allowed corporate funding for express advocacy. In that case, Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (WRTL) had run afoul of the FEC for airing ads that were critical of Democratic Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold’s voting record on abortion, even though the group did not explicitly tell voters to withhold support from him. The group’s defense was that because its ads were ostensibly informative on a policy dimension, they should not be considered “electioneering” and should be protected speech. The Court agreed, holding that in order to be banned under the BCRA electioneering rules, an ad’s only purpose must be to expressly advocate the election or defeat of a named candidate. In formulating their opinion in the case, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues in the majority positioned themselves as defenders of speech rights, writing that “the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.
Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
During the 1930s, Sweden’s birth rate dropped precipitously, and, like the governments of Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government worried about that. Unlike Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government assessed its goals and those of the population and decided that there was a basis of agreement, not on the size of the family, but on the quality of child care. Every child should be wanted and nurtured. No child should be in material need. Every child should have access to excellent education and health care. These were goals around which the government and the people could align themselves. The resulting policy looked strange during a time of low birth rate, because it included free contraceptives and abortion—because of the principle that every child should be wanted. The policy also included widespread sex education, easier divorce laws, free obstetrical care, support for families in need, and greatly increased investment in education and health care.4 Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important goal than the number of Swedes.
Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)
Mercy is defined as compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is in one's power to punish or harm. Imagine what it would be like to live in a country where the candidate we voted for was the one we thought most likely to show people who are suffering compassion and forgiveness. Imagine a government who held mercy as its highest goal. Imagine living within a system who supported people in loving whom they loved, in dressing how they liked, in being who they were. Imagine what that kind of mercy would look like. Now imagine how your life would change if you showered that much mercy on yourself.
Pam Houston (Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom)
Over the following decades, other identity markers became politicized. Religion was next. In an effort to secure the support of evangelical leaders and their increasingly mobilized flock, Republican elites staked out more and more pro-life positions. People like Jerry Falwell, Sr., the leader of the Moral Majority, a political organization associated with the Christian right, grew increasingly powerful. Democrats, seeing a chance to win over more atheists, agnostics, and culturally liberal voters, came out more and more in favor of women’s rights and access to abortion. By the early twenty-first century, if you were Christian or evangelical, you had little choice but to vote Republican. Early partisan divides on abortion were followed by increasingly polarized positions on gay rights and eventually transgender rights. Wealthy Republicans used these issues to capture the white working-class vote, and they largely succeeded, even though voting Republican was often not in workers’ economic interest. Moral imperatives and cultural identities were now, more than ever, driving voting patterns. White evangelicals now represent two-thirds of the Republican Party. By contrast, non-Christians—including agnostics, Jews, and Muslims—represent half of the Democratic Party.
Barbara F. Walter (How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them)
This brought into question the right to use contraception and the rights to interracial and gay marriage, all protected under the same legal argument as abortion. So Democrats set out to protect those rights through federal legislation. But Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly voted to oppose such laws. Although 62 percent of Americans supported reproductive rights, 99 percent of House Republicans voted against them. Although more than 90 percent of Americans supported the right to use birth control, 96 percent of House Republicans voted against it. Although 70 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, 77 percent of House Republicans voted against it. In the Senate, Republicans filibustered the measures altogether.[
Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
If Francis dies before real reform happens—and if his successor proves unwilling or unable to carry on his initiative—then Opus Dei will emerge from its near-death experience invigorated and defiant. Revitalized, backed by its army of donors, the movement will plow forward with its plans to re-Christianize the planet, whether that’s what people want or not. Gay marriage, secular education, scientific research, and the arts will fast become its next targets. Given its supporters’ unexpected victory over abortion, it’s quite possible that Opus Dei and its sympathizers could mastermind equally devastating victories in those areas.
Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
Abortion was murder and no Christian should support it. Even hinting at the nuance got you branded a "baby killer" so it was best to just stick to a black and white approach.
April Ajoy (Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding A True Faith)
TRAGIC RACISM HERETOFORE IGNORED Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all. Proverbs 22:2 Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was a racial eugenicist, a proponent of the idea that through birth control, abortion, and sterilization of the “unfit” we could create a “cleaner” human race and enable “the cultivation of the better racial elements.” She actually addressed this with the Ku Klux Klan. Yet far from repudiating Sanger, liberal leaders defend her. Hillary Clinton expresses great admiration for her; Barack Obama praises Planned Parenthood and asks God to bless what they do; the New York Times has mentioned Sanger as a replacement for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. When the media went into hysterics trying to ban the Confederate Battle Flag—while simultaneously ignoring the revelations about Planned Parenthood harvesting the organs of aborted babies, and babies born alive, for profit—I posted a graphic of the rebel flag alongside the Planned Parenthood logo with this question: “Which symbol killed 90,000 black babies last year?” Our government—using your tax dollars—is not to be subsidizing abortion. It’s illegal and immoral. Yet, Planned Parenthood receives more than a million tax dollars out of your pocket every single day. It shouldn’t get a penny. Good news: light now shines on this darkness. The abortionists were caught on tape nibbling lunch and sipping wine while nonchalantly pondering where to spend the profits made from bartering the bodies of innocent babies . . . just another day at the office. I know that it sounds unbelievable, like something from a macabre horror movie script—but the exposé must stir you to action, lest a nation, through complacency, accept the most revolting mission of Margaret Sanger. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, don’t just pray for unborn children. Demand that Congress stop funding abortion mills; elect a pro-life president; support pro-life centers that provide resources to give parents a real choice in this debate—knowing that choosing life is ultimately the beautiful choice.
Sarah Palin (Sweet Freedom: A Devotional)
In the 1970s there was a decline in the number of infants available for adoption because of efficient contraception, liberalized abortion laws, and support for single mothers. This was the beginning of the placement of older children and special needs children, and the increase in international adoptions and transracial adoptions.
Joyce Maguire Pavao (The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated)
REFLECTION. In discussing abortion, its supporters never defend the act of abortion itself, but only the alleged right of someone to have one. They focus on the freedom to choose it, but avoid describing what is chosen.
Catholic Book Publishing Corporation (Pro-Life Reflections for Every Day)
You cannot rally against abortion, and then support a law that grants unbiblical rights to homosexuals, regardless of whether you think it is the American thing to do. God will not hold you guiltless just because you are dealing with matters of the state. He might just "separate" you from the church altogether and send you to hell. There you can sort out your politics.
Vincent Cheung (Invincible Faith)
Abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the United States, and it is tragic that many women who have abortions are all too often mischaracterized and stigmatized, their exercise of moral agency sullied. Their judgment is publicly and forcefully second-guessed by those in politics and religion who have no business entering the deliberation. The reality is that women demonstrate forethought and care; talk to them the way clergy do and witness their sense of responsibility. Women take abortion as seriously as any of us takes any health-care procedure. They understand the life-altering obligations of parenthood and family life. They worry over their ability to provide for a child, the impact on work, school, the children they already have, or caring for other dependents. Perhaps the woman is unable to be a single parent or is having problems with a husband or partner or other kids.2 Maybe her contraception failed her. Maybe when it came to having sex she didn’t have much choice. Maybe this pregnancy will threaten her health, making adoption an untenable option. Or perhaps a wanted pregnancy takes a bad turn and she decides on abortion. It’s pretty complicated. It’s her business to decide on the outcome of her pregnancy—not ours to intervene, to blame, or to punish. Clergy know about moral agency through pastoral work. Women and families invite us into their lives to listen, reflect, offer sympathy, prayer, or comfort. But when it comes to giving advice, we recognize that we are not the ones to live with the outcome; the patient faces the consequences. The woman bears the medical risk of a pregnancy and has to live with the results. Her determination of the medical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions holds sway. The status of her fetus, when she thinks life begins, and all the other complications are hers alone to consider. Many women know right away when a pregnancy must end or continue. Some need to think about it. Whatever a woman decides, she needs to be able to get good quality medical care and emotional and spiritual support as she works toward the outcome she seeks; she figures it out. That’s all part of “moral agency.” No one is denying that her fetus has a moral standing. We are affirming that her moral standing is higher; she comes first. Her deliberations, her considerations have priority. The patient must be the one to arrive at a conclusion and act upon it. As a rabbi, I tell people what the Jewish tradition says and describe the variety of options within the faith. They study, deliberate, conclude, and act. I cannot force them to think or do differently.
Dennis S. Ross (All Politics Is Religious: Speaking Faith to the Media, Policy Makers and Community (Walking Together, Finding the Way))
Women’s rights and liberation are linked with fetal rights. If a woman claims the right to decide by herself whether the fetus becomes a child or not, what does this do to paternal and communal responsibility? Why should men share responsibility for child support or child rearing if they cannot share in what is declared to be the woman’s sole decision? Furthermore, if explicit intentions and consciously accepted contracts are necessary for moral obligations, why should men be held responsible for what they do not voluntarily choose to happen? Abortion on demand, often advocated as a response to male irresponsibility, legitimates such irresponsibility.
Charles C. Camosy (Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation)
The clergy spoke with the moral force of religion. The American Baptist Convention’s tradition encouraged individual freedoms in theology, church practice and morality. In an article on abortion that he wrote in 1967, Howard Moody stated: “It is a violation of every Protestant ethical stance to support with civil law any matter of personal morality….
Laura Kaplan (The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service)
But Marlise Muñoz, who suffered a stroke when she was fourteen weeks pregnant, was kept on life support in a Texas hospital for seven weeks against her own previously expressed wish and the wishes of her family even though she was brain dead (that is, legally dead) and the fetus was very likely seriously damaged. Texas law denies pregnant women, even those in the earliest stages, the right to have their end-of-life wishes respected.27 Muñoz’s family had to go to court to force the hospital to turn off the machines.
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
Indeed, some cynical liberals have even questioned the sincerity of pro-life advocates as not really being in favor of “life” as an absolute, since they support the death penalty. Other liberals have questioned the morality of pro-life advocates who want to save the lives of some unborn babies (those who would be aborted) and not save the lives of other unborn babies (the great many who die of inadequate pre-and postnatal care). To a liberal, it is both illogical and immoral for someone to want to save the life of an unborn baby whose mother does not want it, but not to want to save the life of a baby whose mother does want it. I
George Lakoff (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think)
In 1998, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was unseated by a vote of no-confidence, Sonia made an abortive bid to become prime minister. She was thwarted by Mulayam Singh Yadav who withdrew support to the Congress-led government after indicating an initial willingness to offer it.
Sanjaya Baru (P. V. Narasimha Rao vs the Nehru-Gandhi Family)