Reproductive Rights Quotes

“Nature gives reproductive rights at puberty.
The same oppressors that make it hard to raise kids by
limiting resources, make it hard to make personal choices.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.”
― Anne Lamott

“Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can’t take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can’t take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.”
― Faye Wattleton

“No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?”
― Shirley Chisholm, Unbought And Unbossed

“You’re not really mad that I’m not having children.

In fact, I would probably love to one day.

You’re mad that I’m expressing autonomy of choice.

You’re mad that I’m considering other options.

You’re mad that I don’t view that as my ultimate potential.

You’re mad that I dare be selfish enough to make choices based on my best interest, something women are not supposed to do.

You’re mad that I consider it a choice, and that I, a woman, am exercising choice.

You’re not mad that I’m not having babies.

You’re mad because I’m acting like a man.”
― Alice Minium

“Many of us were the unplanned children of talented, creative women whose lives had been changed by unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. We witnessed their bitterness, their rage, their disappointment with their lot in life and we were clear that there could be no genuine sexual liberation for women and men without better, safer contraceptives, without the right to a safe, legal abortion.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion - let alone decide on - abortion and divorce. She didn't believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they'd never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.”
― Isabel Allende, Violeta

“Worse than aborting is birthing in instability.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“Is having a child actually fundamentally bettering the world as a whole in any way? There is no shortage of children. Wouldn’t it be better to let people who want children have them, and leave everyone else alone?”
― Alice Minium

“Sonnet of Abortion

My body, my decision,
Whether I choose birth or abortion.
Till a state can care for the newborn,
No bill is qualified to offer resolution.
Instead of controlling my birth canal,
Work on carving a paradigm of equality.
Build a world where a newborn is a gift,
Not a burden on life, dream or economy.
Abolish all disparities born of greed,
Strip the wealthy of their ill-gotten riches.
Use all resources for collective welfare,
So that status ends up on history pages.
Worse than aborting is birthing in instability.
I'll give birth when I need not rely on pity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“Until the state or the church takes full responsibility for a newborn, no bill or bible is qualified to even offer suggestions on a woman's right to abortion.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“Don't sit around and wait for the perfect opportunity to come along —find something and make it an opportunity.”
― Cecile Richards, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead

“If the Constitution doesn’t say anything about a woman’s right to abortion, I’m damn sure it doesn’t say anything about the rights of the unborn.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“Only two things matter in the reproductive health debate: the medical opinions of doctors, and the will of women. Also, feminism is intricately connected with all aspects of our society, including health, but also labor and the economy. A woman can't be an equal player in our society until she has total autonomy, and that includes determining the destiny of her own body.”
― Allison Kilkenny Jamie Kilstein

“Females – sows and cows and hens and women – suffer because of their sex in Western patriarchal cultures, where female bodies are exploited as sex symbols, for reproduction, for breast milk, and/or for reproductive eggs. As such, farmed animals are at the very bottom of the contemporary, Western hierarchy of beings – and this is speceisism.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“There wasn’t any justice for little Black girls, and never had been.”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Take My Hand

“Women and other animals are exploited for their reproductive abilities, and both are devalued as they age and wear out – when they are no longer able to reproduce.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“What it adds up to is that, with the advent of the pill, woman is beginning to get her finger on the genetic trigger. What she will do with it we cannot quite foresee. But it is a far cry from the bull who gets to be prolific just because he's tops at beating the daylights out all the other bulls. It may be that for homo sapiens in the future, extreme manifestations of the behaviour patterns of dominance and aggression will be evolutionary at a discount; and if that happens he will begin to shed them as once, long ago, he shed his coat of fur.”
― Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution

“I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we've gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line. And I trust women to draw the line.”
― Pete Buttigieg

“You are not a reproductive machine. Do you get it? I saved you from slavery.”
― Neda Aria, Feminomaniacs

“By one sentence do mass killings in the world and womb begin: “They don’t look like us and don’t act like us: they’re not human.”
― Agona Apell

“What makes you human without your limbs, human without your nose and toes -- what makes you human without your ears makes the unborn me human without your form”
― Agona Apell

“A child is the price of having sex in post-Griswold America.”
― Michael Gurnow

“Every woman in the world is entitled to have bodily autonomy. One only has to look at history to see making abortions illegal or harder to obtain doesn’t work. All it does is endanger women’s lives. If women are unable to obtain safe abortions, they will use dodgy quacks, buy drugs off the internet or self-abort with a coathanger.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“Together, an LGBTQ+ coalition with class consciousness and anti-racism at its core must recover its radicalism and reaffirm its opposition to capitalism and patriarchy. Infighting and division are in the interests of our right-wing oppressors. Gay people and trans people have had to battle similar arguments about being "unnatural": homophobia still often rests on the prejudice that the worthiest form of sexuality is that which is capable of reproduction. Transphobia, too, emanates from prejudice that a person's stated identity is more trustworthy if it reflects their "natural" role in human reproduction. Similarly, cisgender women's reproductive freedom is the first thing to be curbed by conservative regimes. Misogyny, homophobia and transphobia share much of the same DNA. To the patriarchy, we all do gender wrong.”
― Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice

“I laugh out loud. A kingdom is the center of human reproduction and the king is the reproductive commander-in-chief.”
― Paulina Chiziane, Niketche: Uma História de Poligamia

“I had really given it thought, but still, whenever I tried
to envision what it would be like to bring another human
being into this world and become half of the duo meant to
raise, protect, and love it unconditionally until death did
us part, I felt no inkling of interest or excitement to move
in that direction. Not once.
How was that possible? Motherhood as the epicentre of
women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed, so how was it that
the centre was not there when it came to my own life?
Was I hollow, or was my centre elsewhere?”
― Nicole Louie

“Looking back on my early life helped me understand that not becoming a mother had presented itself as the magic shield that would protect me from the bad experiences my mother and grandmother had gone through. So I held tight to it.”
― Nicole Louie

“The idea that a pregnant person gets the final decision should not lead the men in their lives to just think of themselves as supporters or allies. Men really are stakeholders and beneficiaries when it comes to their partner's reproductive decisions, and they should be out there marching because abortion access is "their issue" too”
― Meera Shah, You're the Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion