When a sullen black woman of 17 or 18 can decide to have a baby and get welfare and food stamps and become a burden to us all, it's time to stop. In parts of South Los Angeles, having babies for welfare is the only industry the people have.
Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life, “Convergence,” mailing of January 2011
January 15 is the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and on or around that day we observe a national holiday in his honor. A week later, on January 22, we recall the tragic decision made that day in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade, unleashing a policy of abortion on demand...Both the civil rights movement and the pro-life movement are evidence of this common engagement. Both movements seek to secure equal rights for marginalized human beings, despite their appearances...Defending the equal dignity of every human being after birth strengthens our witness to the rights of those in danger before birth, and vice-versa. The witness, in fact, is ultimately one.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, New York Times Magazine, July 2009
Ginsberg is commenting on her puzzlement that the Court allowed bans on Medicaid funding of abortion.
Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.
John M. Perkins & Charles Marsh, Welcoming Justice: God's Movement Toward Beloved Community, 2009
Family values and social justice aren’t separate issues. The health of the community depends on the health of the family and the health of the family depends on the justice of the community.
Juli Loesch Wiley, Consistently Opposing Killing, “An Oral History of Prolifers for Survival”
Brent Bozell [was] the most right-wing person I’ve ever met. He was married to Pat Buckley, Bill Buckley’s sister, but he broke with the Buckley family because they were too liberal...He came to see me one snowy night in the early 1980s. He drove through a snowstorm from Washington D.C. to Erie, Pennsylvania nonstop because he wanted to talk to me about nuclear arms. He thought nuclear arms were an abomination...just the theory of nuclear deterrence, but even the mere possession of nuclear weapons, he thought was a mortal sin. And this is a guy who took very seriously the concept of mortal sin...if you threaten, if you possess these diabolical things you could compare it to the possession of hardcore pornography and other things that simply as property don’t deserve to exist. He said some kinds of property don’t have a right to exist...like instruments of torture, nuclear bombs, or [abortion] suction machines.
David Gushee (CL Endorser), “Common Ground on Abortion?”in Prism, Jan/Feb 2011, page 4
I was laughed off [by pro-choicers] when I claimed that abortion places on women the burdens of the sexual revolution’s "liberation." But as a man I totally and viscerally understand that the availability of abortion and the leverage a man has to demand it of "his" lover enables us to exploit our access to women’s bodies without having to pay the ultimate price if it results in an unwanted pregnancy. The pro-choice side can talk about women’s moral agency all day long, but moral decision making happens in contexts of power. To the extent that a man has power or leverage in a relationship with a woman, he can affect or sometimes even direct her decision to have an abortion.
Lanza del Vasto, 1975
"Justified” violence is the worst. Unjustified violence bursts out of a bad character or bad feelings, but it doesn't go very far. But when people feel justified in the use of violence, it becomes systematic and leads to all the horrors of history.
Jesse Jackson, 1977 "March on Washington"
Note: Unfortunately, he changed positions in time for his 1984 run for the Democratic Party nomination, but his reasoning remains.
There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life...that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned. What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth.
Richard Rohr (a CL endorser), Daily Meditation, November 19, 2010, Center for Action and Contemplation
If we do not have a seamless garment of justice that applies to all of our relationships and all of society, we will not be taken seriously on any individual hot-button issue. If we do not seek and pursue justice across the board, then any concerns for or against issues of abortion, homosexuality, immigration, women’s rights, prison reform, opposition to war, etc., should and will be seen as a small rag that has been torn from any clean or consistent cloth of thinking. It is seen as mere self-interest or angry moralizing.
William Saletan, Slate Magazine, June 1, 2009
Note: Saletan favors abortion legality, and as such still makes the connection between it and war.
[George] Tiller was the country's bravest or most ruthless abortion provider, depending on how you saw him ... To me, Tiller was brave. His work makes me want to puke. But so does combat, the kind where guts are spilled and people choke on their own blood. I like to think I love my country and would fight for it. But I doubt I have the stomach to pull the trigger.
Diane Gianelli, "Abortion Providers Share Inner Conflicts," American Medical News, July 12, 1993
A New Mexico physician said he was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. "But paradoxically," he added, "I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria, for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby."
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