If one contends, as we do, that the right of every fetus to be born should be protected by civil law and supported by civil consensus, then our moral, political, and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker. Such a quality-of-life posture translates into specific political and economic positions on tax policy, employment generation, welfare policy, nutrition and feeding programs, and health care. Consistency means we cannot have it both ways: we cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.
Ginette Paris, The Sacrament of Abortion, 1992, 25-27
Men have the right to kill and destroy, and when the massacre is called a war they are paid to do it and honored for their actions. War is sanctified, even blessed by our religious leaders. But let a woman decide to abort a fetus...and people are shocked. What's really shocking is that a woman has the power to make a moral judgment that involves a choice of life or death. That power has been reserved for men...the ancient Goddess Artemis invites us to imagine a new allocation of life and death powers between men and women, an allocation that allows men to appreciate the cost of a life and women to make decisions based on their mother-knowledge.
Nat Hentoff, columnist, speech to the Americans United for Life Forum in Chicago on October 18, 1986 (condensed)
I remain an atheist,a Jewish atheist. For me, this transformation started with the reporting I did on the Babies Doe. While covering the story, I came across a number who were convinced that making it possible for a spina bifida or a Down's syndrome infant to die was the equivalent of what they called "late abortion." These infants were born. They were entitled to at least the same rights as people on death row – due process, equal protection of the law. So for the first time, I began to pay attention to the "slippery slope" warnings of pro-lifers. And I began to find out, in a different way, how the stereotypes about pro-lifers work. When you're one of them and you read about the stereotypes, you get a sort of different perspective.
Jane Addams, 1893, A New Impulse to an Old Gospel
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Mary Krane Derr, “Activism Throughout the Centuries” in Consistently Opposing Killing, p. 127
Many of the earliest Euro-American suffragists were connected to upstate New York, among them the great “suffrage triumvirate” of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and their beloved elder Lucretia Mott. The area’s Native Americans, the Haudenosaunee Six Nations (whom the French called Iroquois), tremendously inspired them. Haudenosaunee women enjoyed remarkable freedom in matters of sex, motherhood, property, marriage, divorce, work, religion, and government. The Haudenosaunee religion’s Code of Handsome Lake cautions against environmental devastation, domestic violence, child abuse, the stigmatization of non-marital pregnancies, and abortion, regarded as unjust fetal life-taking that hurts women, too.
Jonathan Dymond, An Inquiry into War, 1824
When the mind has been familiarized to a practice, however monstrous or inhumane, it loses some of its sagacity of moral perception – profligacy becomes honor, and inhumanity becomes spirit. But if the subject is by some circumstances presented to the mind unconnected with any of its previous associations, we see it with a new judgment and new feelings; and wonder, perhaps, that we have not felt so or thought so before.
Ron Paul, 2008 candidate for U.S. Republican nomination, U.S. Representative from Texas, Liberty Defined, 2011
The consistent right-to-life position should be to protect the unborn and oppose abortion, to reject the death penalty, and to firmly oppose our foreign policy that promotes an empire requiring aggressive wars that involve thousands of innocent people being killed. We would all be better off for it, and a society dedicated to peace, human life, and prosperity would more likely be achieved.
Dick Gregory, Ebony Magazine, October, 1971
Government family programs designed for poor Blacks which emphasize birth control and abortion with the intent of limiting the Black population is genocide. The deliberate killing of Black babies by abortion is genocide – perhaps the most overt of all.
William Brennan, Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives
One of the most remarkable features of anti-life rhetoric is the sheer consistency and stability underlying the denigrating concepts that engulf a wide variety of people rendered expendable. While the range of victims has fluctuated down through the years, the semantic assaults against them have remained stubbornly constant.
Any war, whether semantic or otherwise, requires an identifiable enemy upon whom to impose the derogatory labels. At one time or another almost every imaginable racial, ethnic, religious, age, and social group has suffered the consequences of linguistic abuse...the unborn, the dependent and/or disabled, women, those exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust (primarily Jews, but also Gypsies, Germans with disabilities, Poles, and "asocials"), the targets of Soviet tyranny, African Americans, and Native Americans.
Chang Kao, “The Twelve Medical Talks,” cited in T’ao Lee, “Medical Ethics in Ancient China” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 13 (1943): 268-277
A woman called Pai Mu-tan lived by selling drugs for artificial abortion...Her crying at night could be heard by all the neighbors. One day she asked her son to burn all the prescriptions for abortion and warned him not to engage in such a vocation as hers. Her son asked her why she would not hand down the prescriptions to him. She answered "I dreamed of hundreds of infants striking at my head every night. My illness is entirely due to my selling drugs for abortion."
Don Sloan, abortion doctor, Choice: a Doctor's Experience with the Abortion Dilemma (second edition, 2002), p. 84
Is abortion murder? All killing isn't murder. A cop shoots a teenager who "appeared to be going for a gun," and we call it justifiable homicide – a tragedy for all concerned, but not murder...And then there's war. In theory, soldiers shoot only at each other. But in practice, lots and lots of other folks get killed. We drop bombs where there are non-combatants – women and children and old people – and when they die we call it not murder but "collateral damage." Our soldiers get killed by "friendly fire" – often by people who aimed directly at them. Is that murder? All killing like that, to me, is morally wrong. But murder? Calling abortion "murder" doesn’t make it murder. We are hearing someone’s value judgment placed on what others do.
A.J. Muste, (1885-1967), Executive Secretary of Fellowship of Reconciliation (1940-1953), in All Saints, ed. Robert Ellsberg, Crossroad Publishing, 1997, p. 72
The way of peace is a seamless garment that must cover the whole of life and must be applied in all its relationships.
David Gushee, “Common Ground on Abortion?” Prism, Jan/Feb 2011, page 4, Commenting on his experience at the Princeton life/choice dialog conference
I was struck by the weakness of the positions taken by those on the pro-choice side...I was asked to concur with the view that even when poor women choose abortion (70 percent of abortions are "chosen" by women who live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line) it is a positive expression of their moral agency. I instead am more deeply convinced than ever that the disproportionate resort to abortion among the poor reflects and deepens their entrapment in situations of powerlessness.
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