Pro Quotes

“And yet, women keep trying. They put off the rent or the utilities to scrape together the $500 for a first-trimester abortion. They drive across whole states to get to a clinic and sleep in their cars because they can’t afford a motel. They do not do this because they are careless sluts or because they hate babies or because they fail to see clearly what their alternatives are. They see the alternatives all too clearly. We live, as Ellen Willis wrote, in a society that is “actively hostile to women’s ambitions for a better life. Under these conditions the unwillingly pregnant woman faces a terrifying loss of control over her fate.” Abortion, wrote Willis, is an act of self-defense.5”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“A man’s home is his castle, but a woman’s body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it’s belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn’t her body belong to a fertilized egg as well?”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“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 have only the children they want and can raise 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.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“But “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision, not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court, chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“Your DNA is not you. It is more like the basic instructions for you. DNA is to a person as a blueprint is to a house.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“There’s a reason they call childbirth labor. Making a healthy baby takes effort: It requires foresight and self-denial and courage. It’s expensive and demanding and tiring. You have to learn new things, change many habits, possibly deal with complicated medical situations, make difficult decisions, and undergo stressful ordeals. I had a wisdom tooth pulled without Novocaine while I was pregnant—it hurt a lot and seemed to go on forever. The kindness of the very young dental assistant, holding back my hair as I spat blood into a bowl, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Pregnant women do such things, and much harder things, all the time. For example, they give birth, which is somewhere on the scale between painful and excruciating. Or they have a cesarean, as I did, which is major surgery. None of this is without risk of death or damage or trauma, including psychological trauma. To force girls and women to undergo all this against their will is to annihilate their humanity. When they undertake it by choice, we should all be grateful.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“We don’t like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman’s life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women—and not just modern American women either, but women throughout history and all over the world, from ancient Egypt to medieval Catholic Europe, from today’s sprawling cities to rural villages barely touched by modern ideas about women’s roles and rights.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“The death rate for that is 8.8 women per 100,000.12 As I’ve mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman. (And getting more so, because the maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.)”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“You would almost think the people who have always opposed women’s independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“Actually, abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it’s not a good idea to bring them into the world.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“don’t think women have the right to a self. They are supposed to live for others. Qualities that are seen as normal and desirable in men—ambition, confidence, outspokenness—are perceived as selfish and aggressive in women, especially when they have children.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“Motherhood is the last area in which the qualities we usually value—rationality, independent thinking, consulting our own best interests, planning for a better, more prosperous future, and dare I say it, pursuing happiness and dreams—are condemned as frivolity and selfishness. We certainly don’t expect a man who accidentally impregnates a woman to drop everything and accept a life of difficulties and dimmed hopes in order to co-parent a baby. No college for you, young man—maybe you can pick up some courses later, when your child is in school.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“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

“Even if we all decided to define personhood to include fertilized eggs and embryos and fetuses, they would not have the right to use a woman’s body against her will and at whatever cost to herself. Persons are not entitled to use one another like that: Even if I am the only person in the world who can save my child by donating a kidney, the decision is still mine to make.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“...'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

“What can that mean except that women’s sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will?”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“Many feminist legal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have argued that the Supreme Court should have legalized abortion on grounds of equality rather than privacy.6 Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women’s ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“The scalding rhetoric of the “pro-life” movement seems to propose the derivative claim that a fetus is from the moment of its conception a full moral person with rights and interests equal in importance to those of any other member of the moral community. But very few people—even those who belong to the most vehemently anti-abortion groups—actually believe that, whatever they say.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“It is as if a woman has a right to vote, but the polling place is across the state and casting a ballot costs two weeks’ pay, and as if she has a right to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, but her place of worship is a four-hour bus ride away, and before she can go to services she has to listen to a fundamentalist Christian sermon warning her that if she doesn’t accept Jesus as her personal savior she’s going straight to hell. We would never accept the kinds of restrictions on our other constitutional rights that we have allowed to hamper the right to end a pregnancy.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“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

“A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“There’s pushback on the legislative front as well. In 2013, California passed the nation’s only law that year to expand abortion access: Nurses and some other health professionals (midwives, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants) are now permitted to perform first-trimester nonsurgical abortions.30 (This is what can happen when a state is controlled by Democrats.)”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“As I’ve mentioned before, continuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the US Preventative Services Task Force, there is no medical reason for a gynecological exam to get a prescription for the Pill, with an annual repeat in order to renew it.13”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“No doubt there are other inferior clinics out there. Poor care, overpricing, and rude staffers can be found in every medical field. But you don’t find people using examples of it to inveigh against an entire specialty—railing against the greed of orthopedic surgeons (average 2012 salary, $315,000) or calling for surprise inspections of dentists because every year a few people die from preventable errors during dental procedures.8 Only in abortion care do the few bad providers taint all the others—and taint them so much that opponents can pass laws that would virtually shut down the entire field in the name of patient safety. No”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

“But what does it mean to feel pressured or coerced to abort? Abortion opponents cite lurid news stories of women threatened with guns or even murdered for rejecting abortion. That’s coercion. But a parent who lays out in detail the hard life of a single mother is not forcing a daughter to terminate her pregnancy, nor is a boyfriend who says he’s not up for marriage or ready to be a father, or a sister who says there’s no room for another baby in a shared apartment.”
― Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights