I come to the abortion question by way of a long, long experience with the military and the mainline violence of the culture, expressed in war . . . So I go from the Pentagon and being arrested there, to the cancer hospital, and then I think of abortion clinics, and I see an "interlocking directorate" of death that binds the whole culture. That is, an unspoken agreement that we will solve our problems by killing people in various ways; a declaration that certain people are expendable, outside the pale.
Daphne Clair de Jong, “Feminism and Abortion: The Great Inconsistency,” reprinted in ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today
In the same way that many opponents of slavery and racism have failed to apply their principles to the question of women’s rights, so feminist writers have a peculiarly dense blind spot about the unborn. No argument in favour of freely available abortion is tenable in the light of feminist ideals and principles. And all of them bear an alarming resemblance to the arguments used by men to justify discrimination against women.
Scott Rains, disability-rights activist
My own decision to become publicly active in the prolife movement was, I admit, rather selfish. I followed the news stories while a newborn child was starved at an Indiana hospital because he was born with Down's syndrome. The years I had spent fighting for federal architectural standards, for equal access and equal employment suddenly didn't make sense. If the new strategy was to eliminate those of us with disabilities at birth, then that was where I would stand up for our rights...Having looked at the world with the perspective of a man with a physical disability, I saw an attitude - and a mechanism - of oppression, as tangible as racism, that held people like myself at the margins of society...If being open to the experience of one's disability can lead to action in the prolife movement, what about in the peace movement? A disabled veteran of Vietnam is not likely to have a romanticized idea of war. The disabled children of hibakusha (survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) don't need to ask if it is a sin to build nuclear weapons.
Nat Hentoff, columnist, “You Don’t Have to Believe in God to Be Prolife,” U.S. Catholic, March 1989, 28-30, p. 29
A primary objection, I was told, to the seamless-garment approach was that it would dilute the anti-abortion message, and that was more important than any other because the unborn were being killed right now...I understand the point, but the anti-abortion movement would be stronger if it had more members – members across the spectrum of American politics, religion, and no religion.
Dr. Frank Behrend, M.D., whose practice included abortions, tape-recorded speech November 7, 1977
Reference was made to my agreeing that abortion is taking a human life, which it is. However, let us remember that war is also legalized killing, that the pilot that dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed human life. He got medals for it. We bless our troops when they go into battle to kill human beings, so that the taking of human life, including the death penalty in certain states like Utah, where the man was shot, is not a strange behavior in a society.
Gerard Wilberforce
I am writing as the great great grandson of William Wilberforce, who campaigned vigorously for the ending of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, which ultimately paved the way for the abolition of slavery itself throughout the entire British Empire in 1833. I am often asked what would be the campaigns Wilberforce would be fighting if he were alive in 21st century Britain. I believe that there would be a number of different issues – among them human trafficking and the scourge of drugs. But almost certainly at the top of the list, would be the issue of abortion...are great similarities between the status of the foetus and the status of African slaves two centuries ago...[In] our decision to abort unwanted children, we are no better than those slave traders who put their interests and world view higher than they placed the sanctity and value of human life...Whilst our hearts go out to those who have chosen abortion, there should now be much greater emphasis on the alternatives that exist.
Nicholas D. Kristof, “Another Pill That Could Cause a Revolution,” New York Times Op-Ed, July 31, 2010
Could the decades-long global impasse over abortion worldwide be overcome — by little white pills costing less than $1 each?...Five-sixths of abortions take place in developing countries, where poor sterilization and training often make the procedure dangerous..."I feel like people must have felt when they discovered the nuclear bomb," says Dr. Beverly Winikoff, president of Gynuity Health Projects..."This technology is world-shaking."
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Winner from Kenya, December 7, 2004, press interview
When we allow abortion, we are punishing the women—who must abort their children because their men have run away—and we are punishing the children whose lives are terminated...I want us to step back a little bit and say: Why is this woman and this child threatened? Why is this woman threatening to terminate this life? What do we need to do as a society? What are we not doing right now as a society? A part of that answer lies in this House [pointing at the Kenyan Parliament building].
Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Talk, “The Approach of Midnight” (mid-1970s)
How do we know the limits of the identity of the state of Illinois? By its boundary lines. A basketball court? By its foul lines. How do we know our own identity? By limits; by boundaries; by law; by order. And I think we lost all of these at 8:15 in the morning August the 6th 1945 when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. That bomb blotted out boundaries of life and death, civilian and the military; and trust among nations. And so abortion from that point on is defended on the ground that one may do whatever he pleases.
Helen Prejean, endorsing Consistently Opposing Killing
The societal wounds of racism, poverty, and a penchant for using violence to address problems are intimately connected to the death penalty, to war, to the killing of the old and demented, and to the killing of children, unborn and born. If more people were familiar with the consistent life ethic, as expounded in this book, then the voice of all unseen vulnerable people would be better heard.
Mattie Byrd, Letter to Ira Reiner, Los Angeles District Attorney, around 1989 (therefore referring to a legal abortion)
I am the mother of Belinda A. Byrd...I am also the grandmother of her three young children who are left behind and motherless. I cry every day when I think how horrible her death was. She was slashed by them and then she bled to death, taken from this world on January 27, 1987. She has been stone dead for two years now, and nobody cares. I know that other young black women are now dead after abortion at that address...Where is [the abortionist] now? Has he been stopped? Has anything happened to him because of what he did to my Belinda? Has he served jail time for any of these cruel deaths? People tell me nothing has happened, that nothing ever happens to white abortionists who leave young black women dead.
Frank Kennedy, Who will be today's Wilberforce for unborn children?
Why should slavery, which we now find intolerable, have been accepted 200 years ago? There were many arguments for slavery, some as frivolous as saying that the slave trade "nurtured sailors for time of war," which implied that it desensitized them to the horrors of war. Captain Robert Norris claimed his voyages were "pleasure cruises for slaves" and the West Indian bloc in the House of Commons...claimed that the happiest day in an African's life was when he was shipped away from the "barbarism" of his homeland to the Americas. Is this not like the suggestion that some unborn children (particularly those with a disability) are better off being killed than being given the chance to live?
Dr. Alveda King, Director of African American Outreach for Gospel of Life and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., endorsing Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War
The authors consistently and rationally support the position of opposition to murder in a society where wrong may seem right, to the detriment of life, liberty and justice.
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