Life's Work Quotes

“I see no reason why a woman should feel herself deserving of a separation from God because of a decision she has to make. The Jesus I love has a nonconformist understanding of his faith. He realizes that the petty rules and laws laid down by the fathers and authorities are meaningless, and that to believe in a loving God is to refuse to stand in judgment of any fellow mortal.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“It was not lost on me, an African American man from Birmingham, Alabama, descended from slaves, that new legislation aimed at telling women what they might and might not do with their own physical bodies looked a whole lot like men owning women’s bodies.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“Now I see the Bible as it was written: the inspired word of God, but also a historical document preserving the ancient hegemony of men; starting with Eve, women are always thrown under the bus when it suits the men in power to do so.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“To the point: A woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy has to make her decision in the context of a culture that shames her, and increasingly, within the constraints of laws that dramatically inconvenience her. They demean her humanity by presuming to know better than she does what her best interests are. They limit her access to clinics and doctors and they convey to her false information. The underlying assumption of all the new laws is that women can’t be trusted to make their own health decisions; their doctors can’t be trusted to tell them the truth; and scientific knowledge must be subverted in the name of religious truth.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“It is my personal belief that the abhorrence of abortion expressed by the men who place themselves at the barricades in front of abortion clinics is actually a misplaced horror at women’s sexual autonomy. It stands to reason: women’s sexual independence is the thing that men have always wanted to control. But for the women in the abortion clinic waiting room, the sex itself is history and totally beside the point. They are here to pursue their lives. Every”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“vow: I refuse to give in to fear. The truth is that I am more afraid of living a life of cowardice, of allowing any anxiety over prospective harm to keep me from my convictions. I can live with the awareness that someone might harm me. I am not so sure that I am brave enough to live with the awareness that I was too afraid to do what I knew to be right.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“One thing people don’t talk about enough is how happy so many women are to have had their abortions. No one wants to walk into an abortion clinic, to be sure, but many, many women are grateful and relieved when it’s over.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“Calls from the antis to overturn Roe, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and to defund Planned Parenthood are growing ever louder. Each one of these backward moves will not only restrict women’s access to safe, affordable abortion care, but will diminish women’s access to good health care in general, putting their lives and the lives of their children at risk.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The recasting of fetuses as babies – tiny people who feel pain and are in need of society’s protection – amounts to nothing more than a cynical marketing campaign.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The way I see it, the attack on abortion rights is nothing less than an effort to put all women back in their place.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“protesters find it so easy to insult the women who come to me seeking care—as if rationally deciding to terminate a pregnancy makes a woman heedless and irresponsible like a child. In my experience, the opposite is true: By the time a woman finds herself in my waiting room she has already walked a long, introspective road. She has had to take a good, hard look at her life. She has taken a world of contradictory and sometimes difficult factors into account.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“One of the things that infuriates me the most about the abortion wars, as they’re called, is the way that the antis have shrouded their case in the language of God.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The tactics that the antis have used, for decade, have been so explicitly un-Christian (and I’m not just talking about the murder, arson, bombings, and other terrorist attacks that have stained the anti-abortion movement since its inception) that it seems to me a wonder that any faithful Christian would want any part of them.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The best advocacy is always storytelling.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“a nomad’s existence. Like every busy person, I keep a fantasy future in my mind; I have purchased cooking pots and a double bass for the leisure I imagine but do not possess. Instead, I fill the gaps in my schedule with my other vocation: speaking engagements and board meetings, traveling the country like a twenty-first-century Saint Paul, preaching the truth about reproductive rights, because I have come to see that I’m the one, as the old saying goes, that I’ve been waiting for.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“I can live with the awareness that someone might harm me. I am not so sure that I am brave enough to live with the awareness that I was too afraid to do what I knew to be right. Though”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The underlining assumption of all the new laws is that women can't be trusted to make their own health decisions;”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“A third of American women have had abortions, but a fraction of them are brave enough to stand up and tell their stories. I have found that when women do share their experiences of abortion, out loud, and with one another, and with the men in their lives, they do so much to push away stigma and shame – for themselves and for all women who feel silenced and blamed.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“It is never lost on me that the women in the waiting room have had to walk past these protesters, too. Even if they were escorted to the door by a cheerful young pro-choice activist with bright pink hair who carries a protective rainbow umbrella, they’ve heard the vitriol—different from the insults hurled at me, but no less offensive. “Think twice!” “Don’t murder your baby!” The antis shout these things, as if these women had not minds of their own. As if their decision fails to merit respect. As if they were not, as most of them are, adults exercising a legal right to make a private health-care decision for themselves. (Imagine, if you will, these verbal assaults being hurled at any other person for having made any other consequential health-care choice: the decision to pursue a potentially fatal course of chemotherapy, for example. “Don’t risk your life! Suicide!”)”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“A girl who became accidentally pregnant might be forced to stand up before the congregation on a Sunday morning and beg forgiveness for her sins, while the equally sexually curious boy who helped get her pregnant sat, with his brothers and sisters in Christ, in judgment of her.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“By the time a woman arrives at an abortion clinic and places herself in my care, she has faced a world of judgment and found that everyone—her boyfriend, her own mother, her pastor, her best friend—has something to say.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” It was like a punch, all at once, in my spiritual gut. The Scripture came alive and it spoke to me. For the Samaritan, the person in need was a fallen traveler. For me, it was a pregnant woman. The earth spun, and with it, this question turned on its head. It became not: Is it right for me, as a Christian, to perform abortions? But rather: Is it right for me, as a Christian, to refuse to do them? And in that instant, I understood that I, like the Levite and the priest, had been afraid—afraid of what my Christian brothers and sisters might think of me, of what my pastors and relatives in Birmingham might say, of what the social or political consequences of fully embracing the cause of abortion might be.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“From childhood I had long inferred that abortions were wrong, and for the first half of my career as an ob-gyn, I refused to perform them. But as I matured in both my faith and my profession, I found I was increasingly at odds with myself, an inner conflict that sat uncomfortably with me. I never questioned women’s individual choices, but until I found clarity and certainty around the abortion issue—what I call the head-heart connection—I recused myself, as a practitioner, from the fight. Since”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The women who are matter-of-fact, or stoic, as they undergo this procedure far outnumber those who are anxious or tearful.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“restricting access to abortion—despite the fact that it is legal. In twenty-seven states, women are now forced to wait one, two, or even three days between receiving mandatory “counseling” (which often contains bogus information) and obtaining an abortion, a barrier that puts an undue burden on working women, women with children, and women who live in rural areas, requiring them to take time off work and spend additional money to travel back and forth to a clinic that may be two hundred miles from home.”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“The political conversation about abortion has obliterated truth and crushed any nuanced understanding of what it means to live a human life. Abortion talk in public is so black and while, so bolstered by scientific falsehoods and medical semi-truths, and so distorted by a fog of sentimentality about women and their role as mothers, that it has begun to muddle the thinking even of people in favor of abortion rights. We need to call out these lies and obfuscations for what they are.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“One of the cultural falsehoods that I most rail against is this: each and every abortion is a terrible tragedy and every woman who chooses to have an abortion is therefore a tragic figure. In this narrative, women are helpless victims – and not clear-eyed individuals making a sensible choice to benefit themselves and the people around them. I know, from seeing women every day, how far this is from being true. Most of the women I see are utterly matter-of-fact about what they’re doing.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“In anti-abortion messaging, a dramatic conflation has occurred, obscuring all truth.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“All her life, this woman had been making decisions with her future in mind, and when I saw how consequential this one was to her, my resolve to do this work increased. When”
― Dr. Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

“I seldom see women want to change their minds based on this propaganda. Most are resolute – they are committed to their course of action – but are distressed by the social pressures they feel.”
― Willie Parker, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice