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1 " Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last 'trick', whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.'But how?' we ask.Then the voice says, 'They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'There they are. There *we* are - the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace. "
― Brennan Manning , The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
2 " It is recorded in the monastic rules that a monk once performed an abortion on a girl; the Buddha judged his action seriously wrong, which incurred him the highest offense in the monastic rule. A monk committing this kind of wrongful deed must be expelled from the monastic community. The Buddha considered the embryo to be a person like an adult, so the monk who killed the embryo through abortion was judged by Buddhist monastic rules as having committed a crime equal in gravity to killing an adult. In the commentary on the rule stated above, it is stated clearly that killing a human being means destroying human life from the first moment of fertilization to human life outside the womb. So, even though the Buddha himself did not give a clear-cut pronouncement about when personhood occurs, the Buddhist tradition, especially the Theravada tradition, clearly states that personhood starts when the process of fertilization takes place. "
― , Genomics and Bioethics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Technologies and Advancements
3 " It was more like an abortion than music, but he got a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. Well, we're all pro-choice out here in Hillmont, after all. "
― Frank Portman , King Dork (King Dork, #1)
4 " Feminists have accepted that choice is possible when it comes to a different, difficult subject: abortion. The feminist position (and I agree with it) is that women own their bodies and therefore each woman has the right to choose to get an abortion if she gets pregnant. This is called being " pro-choice" . Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It's her body; it's her right. "
5 " Advancing the notion that there can be many " feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term " power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose. "
6 " The right to choose to abort a fetus is critical, as is the ability to effect that choice in real life, so it's great that Hillary Clinton wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment. But without welfare, single-payer health care, a minimum wage of at least $15--all policies she staunchly opposes--many people have to forgo babies they'd really love to have. That's not really a choice.It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fundraising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands--the opposite, really--of the oligarch class; this is probably a big reason why EMILY'S List has never dabbled in backing universal pre-K or paid maternity leave; a major reason 'reproductive choice' has such a narrow and negative definition in the American political discourse.The thing is, an abortion is by definition a story you want to forget, not repeat and relive. And for the same reason abortion pills will never be the blockbuster moneymakers heartburn medications are, abortion is a consummately foolish thing to attempt to build a political movement around. It happens once or twice in a woman's lifetime.Kids, on the other hand, are with you forever. A more promising movement--one that goes against everything Hillary Clinton stands for--might take that to heart. "
― Liza Featherstone , False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton
7 " In retrospect, it is evident that highlighting abortion rather than reproductive rights as a whole reflected the class biases of the women who were at the forefront of the movement. While the issue of abortion was and remains relevant to all women, there were other reproductive issues that were just as vital which needed attention and might have served to galvanize masses. These issues ranged from basic sex education, prenatal care, preventive health care that would help females understand how their bodies worked, to forced sterilization, unnecessary cesareans and/or hysterectomies, and the medical complications left in their wake. Of all these issues individual white women with class privilege identified most intimately with the pain of unwanted pregnancy. And they highlighted the abortion issue. They were not by any means the only group in need of access to safe, legal abortions. As already stated, they were far more likely to have the means the to acquire an abortion than poor and working-class women. In those days poor women, black women included, often sought illegal abortions. The right to have an abortion was not a white-women-only issue; it was simply not the only or even most important reproductive concern for masses of American women. "
8 " Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible. "
― Leora Tanenbaum , I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet
9 " How could a woman who had an abortion not feel guilt or some sense of remorse? How could she justify what she'd done? Whom else could she blame when everyone was telling her it's her choice? Without facing the truth and confessing it, how could she be forgiven Who could she be restored? How could she be free? "
― Francine Rivers , The Atonement Child
10 " Fear is an abortion of good thoughts "
― Nomthandazo Tsembeni
11 " Gosnell turned almost no one away from the Women’s Medical Society clinic. This is not meant as a compliment. Repentant Gosnell employee Adrienne Moton testified he would perform abortions on any girls or women with no concern about the age of their babies. The only times she could recall Gosnell refusing to perform an abortion was when somebody’s Social Security number couldn’t be verified. In those cases, Gosnell was worried that the “patient” was an undercover cop. "
― , Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer
12 " My suggestion, then, is that we accord the fetus no higher moral status than we give to a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel and so on. Because no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Until a fetus has some capacity for conscious experience, an abortion terminates an existence that is – considered as it is and not in terms of its potential – more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow. "
― Peter Singer , Practical Ethics
13 " About a month after she found out about that, I got pregnant for the first time. I knew I didn't want to have a baby at all, and wanted to get an abortion. But the day I found out, I wasn't sure what to do first. I felt alone and lost and needed someone to call who I could tell. I needed help. I wasn't sure if she would talk to me again so soon after what had happened. I decided to take a chance and try calling her. When I told her, she said, " Well, an abortion is only like $500, so go turn a couple of tricks and get it taken care of," before she hung up on me. I probably should have called someone else, but I didn't know who else to call. "
14 " We believe in funding family planning because it helps to prevent unintended pregnancy. We believe that a woman considering an abortion should not be forced to have an ultrasound against her will. "