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The result [overturning Roe v Wade] will be catastrophic for millions of people who will now be forced by the government to give birth against their will. And it will usher in a new era of surveillance, prosecution, and incarceration for those suspected of facilitating unlawful abortions – including their own. Mark Joseph Stern, Slate magazine June 2022
I mean I was angry with myself for getting pregnant. And the main anger that I had was the failure. I was a failure. A total failure in life. And I mean, had I been successful, had I been a successful artist for example, then maybe I could have gone ahead with having the child. Whether or not I was supported by the father of the child or not. I could have had the conviction and seen the whole thing through. But the fact that I was a failure as a painter, a failure as an artist, and having an abortion gave me another level of failure as a human being. Tracey Emin, film How it Feels
Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need. Marquis de Sade
The Vatican this week attacked America’s nuns for spending too much time working to help the poor and fight poverty, and not spending enough time attacking same-sex marriage. The criticism, considered formal disciplinary action against the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents over 55,000 nuns in the United States, also labelled as ‘grave and a matter of serious concern’ that the nuns are not sufficiently denouncing abortion ... and women’s ordination. The Washington Post article 19th April 2012, ‘Vatican Attacks US Nuns for Fighting Poverty Instead of Gay Marriage’
She had an abortion. I left. I don’t know, I hated her for it. I suppose the way I saw it at the time I suppose is that to take on a child that isn’t mine and then you kill one of my kids. I mean, I don’t know, it sickened me. Really did. Absolutely sickened me. I had no control over her. Mitchell Quy, murderer of wife
I had a medical procedure. It was before we met. The Sopranos s4e7: Watching Too Much Television starring James Gandolfini & Lorriane Bracco & Edie Falco & Michael Imperioli & Dominic Chianese & Steven van Zandt & Tony Sirico & Robert Iler et al, Adriana to Chris
It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael! The Godfather II 1974 starring Robert De Niro & Al Pacino & Robert Duvall & Diane Keaton & Talia Shire & Morgana King & John Cazale & Marianna Hill & Lee Strasberg et al, director Francis Ford Coppola, Kay
I had a relationship once. It was very much like a marriage. We got pregnant. This was long time ago. [sighs] I remember getting up one morning and going to work. Just another day like any other, except it was the first day after I knew about … pregnancy. And I felt this fear for the first time ever. I remember thinking, ‘How can I bring a child into a world like this? How can a person grow up with all this around them?’ I told her I didn’t want to have it, and over the next few weeks, I wore her down. Se7en 1995 starring Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman & Kevin Spacey & Gwyneth Paltrow & Richard Roundtree & Richard Schiff & R Lee Ermey & Mark Boone junior & John Cassini & Reg E Cathey et al, director David Fincher, Somerset
Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place? There’s such balance in nature. George Carlin
How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelet? George Carlin, Back in Town 1996
Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they’re against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ’s sake! Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion! And the Catholics and the Christians are just tossing them aside ... You’d think they’d make natural allies. ibid.
Abortion will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get. Gwendolyn Brooks, The Mother
Kids, I believe that you are the beginnings of a movement that can raise up a moral outcry to overthrow abortion in America and can turn this. Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, Jesus Camp 2006, male pastor’s lecture to children
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Florynce Kennedy, cited Ms March 1973
It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard. Dorothy Parker
The religious objection to stem cell research is that it involves abortion, and the objection to that is that every human being is a unique soul. This is ridiculous. Professor Richard Dawkins, interview Horizon: The President’s Guide to Science 2008
Abortion is a spontaneous thing that happens a great deal anyway. What matters about abortion ... is does anybody suffer? Or does anything suffer? So this obsession with the sacredness of human life is exactly the kind of obscurantist thinking I associate with religion. ibid.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually said, in her speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.’ What? How can a woman with such cock-eyed judgement be taken seriously on any topic, let alone be thought seriously worthy of a Nobel Prize? Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
On 29 July 1994, Paul Hill took a shotgun and murdered Dr John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett outside Britton’s clinic in Pensacola, Florida. He then gave himself up to police, saying he had killed the doctor to prevent the future deaths of ‘innocent babies’. ibid. p295
If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence and neglect, they could make a world shine. Michael Jay Tucker
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children – but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born. Garrett Hardin
George W Bush will protect your unborn foetus, then send your grown child to die in war. Rick Claro
In another sign of the times the Abortion debate came to a head not in the Commons, not in the Lords, but on television. Directed by Ken Loach the BBC Wednesday play Up The Junction chronicled the lives of three girls living around Clapham Junction in South London ... Abortion was legalised in 1967. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed by his own people on Christmas Day 1989 it marked the end of a brutal totalitarian reign that had lasted 24 years ... Ceausescu outlawed abortion in 1966. Agents known as the menstrual police rounded up women to give pregnancy tests and tax the infertile. Across Romania women were forced to have children. Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics, caption, Sky Atlantic 2012; viz also book
In 1973 in a case called Roe v Wade the Supreme Court ruled that abortion .. would now be legal nationwide. Exactly the opposite of what happened in Romania. Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics; viz also documentary
Roe v Wade … It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk. ibid.
To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian that Swiftian. ibid.
No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. Margaret Sanger, atheist & socialist, founder of Voluntary Parenthood League 1914 & responsible for opening first birth control clinic in New York City
We gotta come to some new ideas about life folks ok? I’m not being blasé about abortion, it might be a real issue, it might not, doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that if you believe in the sanctity of life then you believe it for life of all ages. That’s what I hate about this child-worship syndrome going on. ‘Save the children!’ They’re killing children! How many children were at Waco? They’re killing children! What does that mean? They reach a certain age and they’re off your fucking love-list? Fuck your children, if that’s the way you think then fuck you too. You either love all people of all ages or you shut the fuck up. Bill Hicks
We all knew that we were flaunting the law but doing it in the safest way from prosecution that we could ... Before Roe v Wade I had no guilt feelings about what I was doing. I was proud of being able to help the women that I was taking care of. Thomas Allen
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact. Julie Burchill, Damaged Gods, 1986