A Woman's Life Is a Human Life Quotes

“On occasions too numerous to catalog, she interrupted conversations about health care with a warning to "never go to a Catholic hospital! All they care about is the fetus," she railed, "never the mother!" She would say this if my sisters, each of whom has two children, were talking about birthing options. And she would say it if any of us mentioned appendectomy or setting a fractured bone: in my mother's understanding, what she believed was a preference for fetuses over adult women signaled a general lack of trustworthiness, perhaps to the point of medical incompetence.”
― Felicia Kornbluh, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

“Whenever I raised the subject of abortion, Mom would say with what I remember as clenched fists and a flushed face: "You don't understand, Felicia! They" - the illegal abortionists - "were butchers! Butchers!”
― Felicia Kornbluh, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

“In a magazine article that took the form of a personal and political diary, journalist and Redstockings founder Ellen Willis chronicled her reaction to the defeat of the Blumenthal bill. "The abortion reform bill is unexpectedly killed," she wrote in an urgent present tense. "The bill was a farce, but that only makes the Assembly's action more shocking and disgusting. Key man in this spirited affirmation of the compulsory pregnancy system is Assemblyman Martin Ginsberg." She added "My first reaction is simply that I want to kill him. A man who is more concerned about his own hypothetical death than about the real deaths of thousands of women is unsalvageable. [Anti-colonial theorist Frantz] Fanon says that an oppressed individual cannot feel liberated until he kills one of his oppressors. Women? Killing? The idea seems ludicrous. But the anger is there, and it's real, and it will be expressed. We have begun and we can't go back.”
― Felicia Kornbluh, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice