Roe V Wade Quotes

I cannot stand people who disagree with me on the issue of Roe v. Wade... which I believe is about the proper way to cross a lake.

The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.

I think it’s important that (Roe v. Wade) remain legal for medical reasons and other reasons.

It is time to renew the battle for reproductive rights. We have been outmaneuvered, outspent, outpostured, and outvoted by a group of single-issue activists. It has taken them nearly two decades to turn back the principles of Roe. Let's make sure it takes us a shorter time to replace protection for reproductive choice.

Roe has been a good friend, one women could count on when in trouble. We are on uncertain ground after Casey. Women, justifiably, feel vulnerable at a time so many years after their journey for reproductive freedom started.

If the Constitution doesn’t say anything about a woman’s right to abortion, I’m damn sure it doesn’t say anything about the rights of the unborn.

I sometimes wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted bitching about keyboards. The use of keyboards and synthesizers is the Roe v. Wade of '80s metal. It was-without question-the lamest instrument a band could use.

Shame is a very effective way to silence individuals, and those who are less socially or economically powerful are rarely in a position to influence the decisions that affect them.

If you're a pro-lifer, please remember: if life begins at conception, it sure as hell doesn't end at birth.

Secrets keep families sick. You never keep secrets in families because even if the child doesn't know what the secret is, they will always know there is a secret.

Well, let's see. There's—of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others. But, um.

When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade three years later, President Nixon professed there were only two “times when an abortion is necessary”: “when you have a black and a white or a rape.”10

I think one of the reasons I don’t talk to some people about it is because they are so judgmental. Quite frankly, it’s not that society can’t understand, it’s that they won’t understand. People choose to not understand. —

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortion on demand has become engrained in American society. Not only have we killed at least fifty five million Americans in the womb, and emerging from the womb (not including under-reported abortion estimates), we also now kill over 90% of all Down Syndrome babies, solely because of their disability.

MY BODY, MY CHOICE” POWER In the 1990s, if a woman and man make love and she says she is using birth control but is not, she has the right to raise the child without his knowing he even has a child, and then to sue him for retroactive child support even ten to twenty years later (depending on the state). This forces him to take a job with more pay and more stress and therefore earlier death. Although it’s his body, he has no choice. He has the option of being a slave (working for another without pay or choice) or being a criminal. Roe v. Wade gave women the vote over their bodies. Men still don’t have the vote over theirs—whether in love or war.

Never trust a Republican.

Roe isn't really about the woman's choice, is it? It's about the doctor's freedom to practice...it wasn't woman-centered, it was physician-centered.

This is a must-read book for all those who feel they have the right to engage in any part of the debate on sex education, a woman’s right to choose, or the impact of adoption.” —

The damage in many cases was lifelong. These women had not just surrendered a child. They had surrendered control over the most important decision they might ever make to people who they felt did not necessarily have their best interest at heart. The shame was no longer about being single and pregnant. The shame was that they had given away, or not fought hard enough to keep, their child.

And just like that, as if I hadn't said anything at all, the ladies sprang into a conversation about the sinful nature the Jews possessed when killing their Lord Jesus. I didn't know if I was hearing this right because I had become so intoxicated, but I couldn't believe that anyone would talk about religion while on vacation. How could Miss Nebraska think this was a proper environment to discuss something so controversial? One woman went on to say that if she had her way not only would President Bush serve a second four-year term, but she hoped they would overturn Roe v. Wade. This woman was obviously a menace to society and needed to be stopped.

For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.1 Despite the increase in the number of young people having sex in the 1950s and 1960s, access to birth control and sex education lagged far behind. Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain.

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, however, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime. In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.

Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.

With the fate of Roe v. Wade now hanging in the balance, I'm calling for a special 'pro-life tax.' If the fervent prayers of the religious right are answered and abortion is banned, let's take it a step further. All good Christians should legally be required to pony up; share the financial burden of raising an unwanted child. That's right: put your money where your Bible is. I'm not just talking about paying for food and shelter or even a college education. All those who advocate for driving a stake through the heart of a woman's right to choose must help bear the financial burden of that child's upbringing. They must be legally as well as morally bound to provide the child brought into this world at their insistence with decent clothes to wear; a toy to play with; a bicycle to ride -- even if they don't consider these things 'necessities.' Pro-lifers must be required to provide each child with all those things they would consider 'necessary' for their own children. Once the kid is out of the womb, don't wash your hands and declare 'Mission Accomplished!' It doesn't end there. If you insist that every pregnancy be carried to term, then you'd better be willing to pay the freight for the biological parents who can't afford to. And -- like the good Christians that you are -- should do so without complaint.

Is it only a coincidence that the same arc of time defining this reinvigorated clerical corruption about sexuality has seen the rise of the fervently political Catholic Church crusade against abortion? It is as if the 1973 war Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court threw a lifeline to the morally discredited Catholic hierarchy.

We are starting to slide when we start to judge our brother’s motives by whether or not he experiences the same gut response of reactive compassion to the outrage we are assigned to deal with. But a Christian nurse in Romania who has dedicated herself to caring for abandoned orphans with birth defects may never have heard of Roe v. Wade. She doesn’t need to.

If we imagine the worst-case scenario, with Roe v. Wade overruled, there would remain many states that would not go back to the way it once was. It doesn’t matter what Congress or the state legislatures do, there will be other states that provide this facility, and women will have access to it if they can pay for it. Women who can’t pay are the only women who would be affected.

majority described the pressure on the Court and explained why “principles of institutional integrity” required that Roe v. Wade be reaffirmed. A “terrible price would be paid for overruling,” the three justices wrote, adding that such a step “would seriously weaken the Court’s capacity to exercise the judicial power and to function as the Supreme Court of a Nation dedicated to the rule of law.

Women were expected to wait and learn about sex from their husbands, who would bring their sexual experience to the marriage. I’ve never quite figured out how that was supposed to be mathematically possible, but presumably the theory was that the future husbands gained their experience with a few bad girls who were not marriage material and who were having sex with the majority of the male population.

During the 1980s, however, the Court came under increasing pressure to repudiate Roe v. Wade. First the Reagan administration and then the administration of President George H. W. Bush asked the Court to overturn the decision, on five separate occasions. In 1980 the Republican party’s platform had called for the first time for the appointment of judges “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.

If Roe v. Wade is ever overturned, the foster care system will likely be flooded with special needs cases. Will we, as God’s people, be prepared to take care of the children who were not aborted, but then abandoned? If we claim to be “pro-life,” we must be willing to take an honest look at our attitudes toward children with disabilities. We must be honest with ourselves about how the church has handled and in some cases even mishandled this issue.

The pro-life cause originated at a far earlier date than historians have previously thought, and its origins were not tied to a backlash against the women’s movement, but instead to a concern about the consequences of the nation’s disrespect for human life. This book also challenges conventional presuppositions about the pro-life movement by showing that it originated not among political conservatives, but rather among people who supported New Deal liberalism and government aid to the poor, and who viewed their campaign as an effort to extend state protection to the rights of a defenseless minority (in this case, the unborn). Only after Roe v. Wade, when the pro-life movement’s interpretation of liberalism came into conflict with another rights-based movement—feminism—and it became clear that pro-lifers would not be able to win the support of the Democratic Party, did the movement take a conservative turn.

My father was neither an ally nor a confidant, but it seemed backward to me that this hardworking man would be relegated to the sofa while my lazy mother got the king-size bed. I resented her for that, but she seemed immune to guilt and shame. I think she got away with so much because she was beautiful. She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk. I assume she blamed my father for ruining her life—she got pregnant and dropped out of college to marry him. She didn’t have to, of course. I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade. Her family was the country club brand of alcoholic Southern Baptists—Mississippi loggers on one side, Louisiana oilmen on the other—or else, I assumed, she would have aborted me. My father was twelve years older than my mother. She’d been just nineteen years old and already four months pregnant when they got married. I’d figured that out as soon as I could do the math.

Here’s the headline: In the first year alone, women saved $ 1.4 billion on birth control pills. Today we’re at a thirty-year low for unintended pregnancy, a historic low in teen pregnancy, and the lowest abortion rate since Roe v. Wade. These facts are too often overlooked, even though this is one of the biggest public health success stories of the last century. It didn’t happen on its own—it happened in large part due to better and more affordable access to birth control.

Since the legally and morally despicable decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973, American women have aborted some 56 million children. The vast majority of these children have been aborted for reasons that have nothing to do with rape, incest or the health of the mother. We have destroyed an entire generation of children purely for self-worship. Children are difficult; therefore, they can be done away with. Children are burdensome; therefore, they don’t exist in the womb.

Even the most mundane, establishment-oriented law schools routinely teach that important legal cases lag far behind the social movements that create them,' writes Judith Brown, a 1968 women's liberation founder who became a lawyer. She continues: 'Supreme Court cases bob along behind social reality like little rowboats towed behind huge gun-ships... When we celebrate Roe v. Wade we celebrate--not the legal opinion of nine men in D.C.--but the thousands of women who forced a change so that what was once illegal became legal.

At the tail end of the Reagan years the Democratic Party, with the aid of Clinton/Gore–led groups like the Democratic Leadership Council, presented us with a new kind of “business-friendly” Democrat, one who voted the right way on choice and minority rights but was “willing to work with business” on such matters as free trade, deregulation, privatization, government spending, and personal debt. Such a Democrat, we were told, could win: we’d be giving up a thing or two in terms of workers’ rights and other matters, but at least Roe v. Wade would be safe for now.

The greatest injustice in the universe is not that there are people dying of AIDS or people starving to death, even as you read this. It’s not that there have been over fifty million abortions in America since Roe v. Wade. It’s not even that there are twenty-seven million human slaves in the world today. These things are absolutely awful. They are worthy of judgment, and I believe they break the heart of God. But these, even combined, are not the greatest injustice. The greatest injustice in the universe is that there are human beings who do not worship Jesus Christ.

And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.

Justices in the United States believe that their duty is to uphold the Constitution, but if they do not understand that the authority of the Constitution itself rests upon the inalienable natural rights of all human beings, then they not only undermine the Constitution, which they are sworn to uphold but also turn themselves into wielders of arbitrary power. Regrettably, this misuse of power occurred in both the Dred Scott decision and in the Roe v. Wade decision (and its subsequent interpretation in cases such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey).

The political reaction against Roe v. Wade built slowly. The first justice to join the Court after the January 1973 decision was John Paul Stevens, named by President Gerald Ford in December 1975. Yet remarkably enough, the nominee was not asked a single question about abortion during his confirmation hearing. If the senators’ questions during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing provide a reliable window onto the country’s law-related concerns, then it is reasonable to conclude that abortion had not yet become a national political issue nearly three years after the Court’s decision.

People Vs Supreme Court (The Sonnet) When the Supreme Court behaves prehistoric, Every human must become an activist. When the gatekeepers of law behave barbarian, Every civilian must come down to the street. When people are stripped off their basic rights, By some bigoted and shortsighted gargoyles. We the people must take back the reins, And put the politicians in their rightful place. We need no guns and grenades, we need no ammo, Unarmed and unbent we stand against savagery. Till every woman obtains their right to choice, None of us will sit quiet in compliant apathy. Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal, It falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.

The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

By the 1950s, most Republicans had accommodated themselves to New Deal–era health and safety regulations, and the Northeast and the Midwest produced scores of Republicans who were on the liberal end of the spectrum when it came to issues like conservation and civil rights. Southerners, meanwhile, constituted one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful blocs, combining a deep-rooted cultural conservatism with an adamant refusal to recognize the rights of African Americans, who made up a big share of their constituency. With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came time to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds. The story of how this postwar consensus broke down—starting with LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his prediction that it would lead to the South’s wholesale abandonment of the Democratic Party—has been told many times before. The realignment Johnson foresaw ended up taking longer than he had expected. But steadily, year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon’s southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority, union busting, and Robert Bork; through assault weapons bans and the rise of Newt Gingrich, gay rights and the Clinton impeachment—America’s voters and their representatives became more and more polarized.

We've known for a long time that this day would come. Today, an illegitimate Supreme Court-- stacked with justices who have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, installed by presidents who took power via undemocratic sleights of hand-- ratified their cause of eroding the 14th amendment and the right to bodily autonomy. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be lethal to Americans - particularly, Black women and queer people - who now will lose their already limited access to abortions. If establishment Democrats sit back and allow this Court to continue to dismantle every right protecting marginalized people, this decision won't just cost lives - it also will cost us our democracy. Our leaders in Washington must recognize how the tyranny of the minority, white supremacy, misogyny and bigotry brought us to this dark day. And they must act now to protect voting rights and enshrine the right to an abortion into federal law -- before it's too late.

Six million women were abused in 1991. One in every six was pregnant." --- Sally Jessy Raphael Abuse against women is more than a crime of violence. It is a statement about society's view of women and itself. Women have been viewed as property, tools of pleasure, and underlings. The people who support these views forget that women are the mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, and nieces who raise the fathers, sons, uncles, brothers, and nephews. Women are the creative force of the world. The world's treatment of women will be reflected in the things men create. Every man of color has an ancestral obligation to get clear regarding his views about women. Childhood pains, adolescent disappointments, adult misconceptions must be mended and forgiven. Every woman of color has a responsibility to all women of color to reveal the violence against her, to heal her wounds, and do everything in her power to make sure another woman is healed." Mantra: I Am every woman; Reflection: Consider the women in your life who have been victims of physical or sexual abuse. What can you do today to help one woman heal or to end the painful cycle for future generations? ----Iyanla Vanzant, from Acts of Faith: Daily Meditations for People of Color

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.

So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history? As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (2006) provides dramatic instances of the lifelong impacts of early pregnancy and of giving up a baby.

In a fascinating admission, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade acknowledged that under another, separate common law rule, an unborn child has inheritance rights. (Roe v. Wade, page 162). What they failed to mention (for obvious reasons) was that the common law clearly says these inheritance rights exist from the moment of conception! (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England ,Vol. 1, pg. 126 (1765)). Doesn’t it seem ironic—as well as exceedingly illogical—that an unborn child would have his property rights better protected from the moment of conception than his life?

When asked if he believes it’s realistic to think that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing abortion could be overturned in his lifetime, Barron is cautiously optimistic. Probably not in our lifetime, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’d make a comparison with slavery. At a certain point in American history, nobody would have imagined the possibility of slavery being overturned. Very smart people, very morally plugged-in people, were defenders of slavery in 1830, 1840, including Christians at a very high level. Politicians at the highest level didn’t think slavery could be overturned in 1820 or 1840, and yet now slavery is unthinkable. It’s the same with civil rights. In the 1930s and ’40s, a lot of very high-placed people, including religious people, wouldn’t have imagined the overturning of Jim Crow, but now it’s a fact. I find that, by the way, from a theoretical standpoint, fascinating, how that happens in a society. How at one point something is commonly accepted, and fifty years later it’s unthinkable. I don’t rule out that, at some point, the same could happen with abortion. I hope, in God’s providence, it will become unthinkable that we’re murdering children at the rate of millions per year. I don’t know if it will happen in our lifetimes, because you and I don’t have that much longer to go! But I also don’t rule it out.

I’d like to be known just as a good worker in the vineyard who held his own and contributed generally to the advancement of the law.” Harry Blackmun, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1970–1994, author of the Roe v. Wade decision. Section 5, Lot 40-4, Map Grid V/W-36, Arlington National Cemetery.

One year later, the court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally.

In the first year alone, women saved $1.4 billion on birth control pills. Today we’re at a thirty-year low for unintended pregnancy, a historic low in teen pregnancy, and the lowest abortion rate since Roe v. Wade.

in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried.

My personal struggle is to get beyond thinking I’m not worth caring about. I am here. I do exist. Maybe by adding my two cents I can help other moms who feel the way I do. Maybe they will find someone who cares. —

I was abandoned when it was right in everybody’s face, so I still believe that nobody cares.

According to the prevailing double standard, the young man who was equally responsible for the pregnancy was not condemned for his actions. It was her fault, not their fault, that she got pregnant. This was in that period of time when there wasn’t much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something. —

When we would take the van to go places, the neighbor’s kids would throw things at us—rotten fruit, eggs—and eggs hurt. When you get hit in the face with an egg, that hurts, and sometimes it would actually break the skin. They would never let us go back in the house to change. I remember one time they took us to the beach to walk the boardwalk and we had gotten pelted pretty good. So here we are, a gaggle of pregnant girls marked with this stuff, and it smelled. I was thinking to myself, “You know, they tell us not to make a spectacle of ourselves, to maintain our dignity, but they go out of their way to make sure we’re humiliated.” We

It’s very hard to explain—part of me had enough indoctrination to believe I was not a mother. They make that very clear: “You’re not a mother. You are too young. You are a bad person. You got pregnant and you aren’t married. You are not entitled to this baby. You’re gonna give this baby a chance in life.” Part of me accepted that wisdom, but then there was the other part of me that had feelings that I wasn’t supposed to have. So

Though many other nations, but not all, also allow abortion, it has been America which has led in the abortion movement. Once Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court of the world’s leading nation, the number of abortions took off in nations across the globe. Prior

Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973. Most of those Americans who were, say, about fifty years old, in 1973, will not likely be around, due to the sheer passage of time, when the blood of aborted Americans is accounted and avenged. On the other hand, for those of us who were fifty years old or younger when Roe v. Wade was handed down, and therefore Roe v Wade was allowed by us as Americans to continue as the law of the land, though we were of an age and level of influence that we could have done something about it, we may likely witness the destruction of the world’s leading abortion nation in the end times. That’s justice. It happened on our watch, during our time of influence, we let it happen, and today we continue to let it happen.

She said, “You know, if we’re gonna have a relationship I want you to know who I am. I’m gay.” I said, “I don’t care.” And I really don’t care because, oh God, if you can find love you’re lucky.

My mom said, “You can’t see him. You’re not allowed.” And there was a nurse standing on the other side of me at the head of the bed and I can remember her saying, “She can see him whenever she wants. She’s that baby’s mother.” That nurse didn’t give me enough self-confidence to keep my child, but with those two sentences she gave me the foundation on which to rebuild my sense of self. She probably didn’t remember me after that shift, but she became one of the most important women in my life. Just by her compassion and two sentences, you know?

It’s worth noting that some scholars see close parallels between the 1857 Dred Scott decision - which left slaves as the legal property of their owners - and Roe, which left unborn children as the legal property of their mothers. (Christianity Today - Jan/Feb 2019)

The Roe v. Wade decision had come down on a Monday in January of 1973, and I remember the afternoon newspapers sold out as word spread. I watched my daddy sit down in his chair and silently read, shake his head and then leave the paper on the coffee table. We never discussed it, but surely he knew that there were houses out in the country where women went to have the procedure, even before the ruling. I’d gone to one in Opelika, one where Miss Pope believed I could get safe care. And it had still been a risk. Surely Daddy understood that women needed a trustworthy place. Some women traveled to New York to have the procedure, but that was too far for most of us. Make no mistake about it, that ruling was a big deal.

Contemporary conservatives often make Roe v. Wade the turning point in the story. In this account, the Religious Right emerged out of opposition to abortion. But the facts don’t really fit that story particularly well. Conservative white Protestants did not become pro-life until the late 1970s. Before that, Protestants were divided on the question and abortion was seen as a “Catholic” issue. The rightward turn of white evangelicals actually began a quarter-century earlier with another Supreme Court case: Brown v. Board of Education. The political architects of the Religious Right—Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie—were quite clear on this point. Opposition to racial integration was the real catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right.

Ain't My Fourth of July (The Sonnet) Fourth of July comes and goes, Yet slavery remains and thrives. It kills in the name of supremacy, It causes ruin in a pro-life guise. Real advocates of life value life, And place life above all belief. Belief that values guns over person, Is only pro-death and pro-disease. Freedom involves accountability, Without which we are just free animals. Those who turn superstition into law, Are no judge but a bunch of dumbbells. This ain't my Fourth of July, for I actually value life. Till all lives are deemed equal, I'll continue to strive.

Those who turn superstition into law are no judge but a bunch of dumbbells.

[…] she taken turpentine and she taken too much, I guess, and she died. She bled to death and died”. She was not alone. Prior to the 1974 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that a woman’s right to personal privacy gave her the right to decide whether or not to have an abortion, large numbers of women who died from illegal abortions were Black. In New York, for example, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions, 80 percent of the women who died from illegal abortions were Black or Puerto Rican.

Roe v. Wade, 1973 The Constitutionally implied right to privacy protects a woman’s choice in matters of abortion. Norma McCorvey sought an abortion in Texas, but was denied under state law. The Court struck down that law, on grounds that it unconstitutionally restricted the woman’s right to choose. The opinion set forth guidelines for state abortion regulations; states could restrict a woman’s right to choose only in the later stages of the pregnancy. Later modified but not overruled, the decision stands as one of the Court’s most controversial.

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.

Mann had an abortion shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade invented a constitutional right to abortion.

The double standard is still very much a part of our cultural psyche. It is still tolerated within institutions and families and ultimately damages generations of men and women alike. These women were made to carry the full emotional weight of circumstances that were the inevitable consequence of a society that denied teenage sexuality, failed to hold young men equally responsible, withheld sex education and birth control from unmarried women, allowed few options if pregnancy occurred, and considered unmarried women unfit to be mothers. Asking the women to keep their secret and deny their child may have worked out well for others, but not for many of the mothers. Their experience and their motherhood have been silenced and denied for too long. (Page 300)

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.

In honor of today's abysmal SCOTUS decision, let's talk a little bit about why companies hire gorgeous, wonderful, amazing, genius women like Ketanji Brown at the most inopportune moments. It's called the 'glass cliff,' where they literally will hire women, and particularly women of color, where the company is in such dire straits that it really doesn't matter anymore. If the company fails, they blame it on their scapegoat, of their minority hire, their minority choice. And if it succeeds, now they have somebody that they can elevate and raise on their shoulders, and look like they are super accepting, and then hand it over to somebody that they typically would hire. . . So obviously I'm ecstatic that we got Ketanji on the Supreme Court, but what Supreme Court is she walking into? What will she be able to do with this much opposition?

. . .It would have been better to approach it under the equal protection clause.

Six million women were abused in 1991. One in every six was pregnant." --- Sally Jessy Raphael Abuse against women is more than a crime of violence. It is a statement about society's view of women and itself. Women have been viewed as property, tools of pleasure, and underlings. The people who support these views forget that women are the mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, and nieces who raise the fathers, sons, uncles, brothers, and nephews. Women are the creative force of the world. The world's treatment of women will be reflected in the things men create. Every man of color has an ancestral obligation to get clear regarding his views about women. Childhood pains, adolescent disappointments, adult misconceptions must be mended and forgiven. Every woman of color has a responsibility to all women of color to reveal the violence against her, to heal her wounds, and do everything in her power to make sure another woman is healed." Mantra: I Am every woman; Reflection: Consider the women in your life who have been victims of physical or sexual abuse. What can you do today to help one woman heal or to end the painful cycle for future generations?

Charles stopped. Spun around. “You ever hear of a woman named Norma Leah McCorvey?” he asked. Daniel leaned back on the wall so his bad leg wouldn’t drain his batteries. “Didn’t she pass away? She lived two halls over, right? The woman with—” “No, no. That was Norma Robinson. Yeah, she passed away in ’32. Norma McCorvey lived, oh, over a hundred years ago. She was more famously known as Jane Roe.” Daniel knew that name. “Roe v. Wade,” he said. “That’s right. One of the biggest decisions before your wife came along . . .” The nurse-bot studied his shoes again. “And people remember her for that—for the decision. They remember her as Roe, not as McCorvey.” “I don’t follow,” Daniel told Charles. He eyed his wife’s door and fought the urge to be rude. “Well, most people don’t know, but years later—Norma regretted her part in history. Wished she’d never done it. Converted to one of the major religions of her day and fought against the progress she’d fostered. I just . . .” He looked back up. “I’ll always remember you and your wife for the right reasons, is all.” He turned to his cart without another word and started down the hall.

The blame for the overturning of Roe v Wade does not fall upon the overzealous, vindictive evangelical—either in a pew or judge’s robe—anymore than it does the bruised-knee legislator and his Plus-1, the campaign-financing lobbyist: All are boorish cultural phenomena, buoyed by society’s currents, political inertia determining their every direction. Instead, history will shake its head in disappointment at those who stood idly by and did nothing.

It follows if sexual naiveté and inexperience is virtuous, being apt at—or even having more than the most rudimentary knowledge of—sex is indicative of being a bad Christian. In this respect, ignorance and inability are honorable traits as opposed to easily remedied shortcomings but, then again, Christianity’s foundation rests on the precept that knowledge is the first, i.e., Original, and foremost wrong, i.e., Sin.

Church leaders have little to offer their congregants in the way of practical sex advice. This is why 'preacher' and 'sex god' are never synonyms.

In later unenumerated rights cases the Supreme Court has, for whatever reason, shied away from Justice Goldberg’s suggestion. That has not prevented it from using tests looking to “traditions” and the like for “fundamental rights” worthy of its protection, such as in famous unenumerated rights cases like Roe v. Wade (abortion), Troxel v. Granville (parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children), or Lawrence v. Texas (right of same-sex intimate sexual conduct).59 But in none of those or related cases has it invoked the Ninth Amendment beyond, at best, a passing reference. Thus, Justice Goldberg’s undeveloped but interesting thoughts on the matter are the only more than transitory statements on the Ninth Amendment from the nation’s highest court.

The Bible didn’t offer specific advice on the topic (abortion). Many evangelicals disapproved of “abortion-on-demand,” but not in the case of rape or incest, where fetal abnormalities were present, or when a woman’s life was at risk. In 1968, Christianity Today considered the question of therapeutic abortion—was it a blessing, or murder? They gave no definitive answer. As late as 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging states to expand access to abortion. But with the liberalization of abortion laws, and as abortion proponents began to frame the issue in terms of women controlling their reproduction, evangelicals started to reconsider their position. In 1973, Roe v. Wade—and the rising popularity of abortion in its wake—helped force the issue, but even then, evangelical mobilization was not immediate. Only in time, as abortion became more closely linked to feminism and the sexual revolution, did evangelicals begin to frame it not as a difficult moral choice, but rather as an assault on women’s God-given role, on the family, and on Christian America itself.

The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.

Since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was codified as law, over sixty-three million babies have had their innocent lives snuffed out in America’s abortion clinics.6 I have made it clear that I’m trying to stay away from politics, but this isn’t a political issue any more than Christian opposition to slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, or Jim Crow laws were political.

the same week as the Taliban ruling in Afghanistan—we in the United States got the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion to roll back in brutal ways recently gained rights in the United States with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It could be that the Taliban action and Alito’s draft opinion occurred in the same week only by coincidence. It could be, but we may doubt it. The two matters are a part of a vigorous, worldwide reassertion of patriarchy that occurs in many places under authoritarian regimes. I take it that Alito’s opinion belongs to that worldwide enterprise. It flies under the compelling banner of “pro-life,” but the moment should be recognized for what it is, not at all “pro-life,” but anti-abortion and anti-woman.

forced upon others who do not believe it, or when they believe that nonbelievers should be prevented from the robust or humorous expression of their nonbelief, then there’s a problem. The weaponizing of Christianity in the United States has resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion, and women’s right to choose. As I say above, the weaponizing of a kind of radical Hinduism by the current Indian leadership has led to much sectarian trouble, and even violence. And the weaponizing of Islam around the world has led directly to the terror reigns of the Taliban and the ayatollahs, to the stifling society of Saudi Arabia, to the knife attack against Naguib Mahfouz, to the assaults on free thought and the oppression of women in many Islamic states, and, to be personal, to the attack against me.

Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case.

Four decades after Roe v. Wade, many have forgotten why the restrictive laws were changed: women. Our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters were suffering and dying in large numbers – needlessly. After legalization, the carnage stopped. A generation has grown up unaware of the horrors of the bad old days

More than any other issue, the fight to oveturn Roe v. Wade unified conservative Christians across the theological spectrum, giving them a sense of purpose and validating those first uncertain steps into politics.

So the years 1973–78 were apocalyptic years not just for me, but for the millions upon millions of people around the world dominated by capitalism. For many Americans, especially those in the North and Northeast, the economic conditions in the early 1970s were in fact quite brutal. Between 1970 and 1977, one million jobs disappeared. The rapid and massive displacements of capital and jobs due to increasing globalization and deindustrialization caused immense human suffering for those on the lower levels of the economic ladder, compounded by chronic stagflation and deep cuts in social spending under the Nixon administration.11 Add to these economic crises the political and cultural turmoil of the early 1970s stirred by the Watergate revelations, the abandonment of the gold standard for currency, the energy crisis, the ignominious retreat from Vietnam, and Roe v. Wade.12 For many people, these economic, political, and cultural upheavals made for apocalyptic times indeed.13

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

There’s no denying women are doing better than they ever have, but is that really saying much? When you consider what life was like for women before suffrage, before Title IX, before the Equal Pay Act, before Roe v. Wade, before any number of changes that made life merely tolerable, most any success women encountered would seem like a rise in circumstance. Rosin

I know what my parents thought they were bringing me to, but that’s not where my parents left me. I didn’t understand it at the time, but in the military they do a thing where they train you to comply with the rules by tearing you down and breaking your spirit so you will conform, and then little by little they build you into what they want you to be. That’s what they did there. I was gonna try and get through this and get out. That was my goal.