Katha Pollitt Quotes & Sayings

That thought gives rise to a wish. Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser. Something you could buy at the supermarket, or maybe several things you could mix together, items so safe and so ordinary they could never be banned, that you could prepare in your own home, that would flush your uterus and leave it pink and shiny and empty without you ever needing to know if you were pregnant or about to be. — Katha Pollitt

If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body? — Katha Pollitt

We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women. — Katha Pollitt

We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country - why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies. — Katha Pollitt

Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger. — Katha Pollitt

On the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves. — Katha Pollitt

Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during pregnancy, and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law was proposed in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy. — Katha Pollitt

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men. — Katha Pollitt

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it? — Katha Pollitt

Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser. — Katha Pollitt

An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that "a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain."8 — Katha Pollitt

I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers. — Katha Pollitt

For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking. — Katha Pollitt

There had always been a little wiggle room in state abortion laws, because doctors were still permitted to perform them for "therapeutic" reasons - to save a woman's life, for example.7 But what did that mean, exactly? An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that "a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain. — Katha Pollitt

Actually, abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it's not a good idea to bring them into the world. — Katha Pollitt

I wonder if my mother knew that her own grandmother died of an abortion after bearing nine children, back in Russia, during the First World War, or if her mother kept that family secret from her as she kept her secret from me. Women's lives are different now - so much so we're in danger of forgetting how they used to be. Legalizing abortion didn't just save women from death and injury and fear of arrest, it didn't just make it possible for women to commit to education and work and free them from shotgun marriages and too many kids. — Katha Pollitt

And yet, women keep trying. They put off the rent or the utilities to scrape together the $500 for a first-trimester abortion. They drive across whole states to get to a clinic and sleep in their cars because they can't afford a motel. They do not do this because they are careless sluts or because they hate babies or because they fail to see clearly what their alternatives are. They see the alternatives all too clearly. We live, as Ellen Willis wrote, in a society that is "actively hostile to women's ambitions for a better life. Under these conditions the unwillingly pregnant woman faces a terrifying loss of control over her fate." Abortion, wrote Willis, is an act of self-defense.5 — Katha Pollitt

When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak. — Katha Pollitt

Funny how ready people are to believe that counseling, which even when voluntary takes years to modify garden-variety neuroses, can work wonders in months with resistant patients who hate each other. — Katha Pollitt

While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing. — Katha Pollitt

They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control. — Katha Pollitt

We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child - indeed, sometimes more moral. — Katha Pollitt

Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters ... — Katha Pollitt

If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see? — Katha Pollitt

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes. — Katha Pollitt

don't think women have the right to a self. They are supposed to live for others. Qualities that are seen as normal and desirable in men - ambition, confidence, outspokenness - are perceived as selfish and aggressive in women, especially when they have children. — Katha Pollitt

What can that mean except that women's sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will? — Katha Pollitt

Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to. — Katha Pollitt

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not assume that her body ceased to be her own because she was pregnant. — Katha Pollitt

Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times — Katha Pollitt

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, — Katha Pollitt

One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other. — Katha Pollitt

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital. — Katha Pollitt

Misogyny runs deeper than religion. — Katha Pollitt

For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom. — Katha Pollitt

But "Trust Women" doesn't mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision, not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court, chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot. — Katha Pollitt

I'm a writer; I can float for hours on a word like "amethyst" or "broom" or the way so many words sound like what they are: "earth" so firm and basic, "air" so light, like a breath. You can't imagine them the other way around: She plunged her hands into the rich brown air. Sometimes I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core. — Katha Pollitt

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking. — Katha Pollitt

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars. — Katha Pollitt

the late 1940s, hospitals in many states set up abortion committees to which a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy could appeal.9 It was a humiliating process, which could involve multiple physical examinations and interrogations by unsympathetic doctors. — Katha Pollitt

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted
anything!
the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women
or anyone
as chattel or inferior beings. — Katha Pollitt

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door. — Katha Pollitt

The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man. — Katha Pollitt

But now, with clinics disappearing, more and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills, as women do in Ireland and other countries where it is illegal for a woman to end a pregnancy. Some will end up in emergency rooms. Some will be injured. Some may die. This is what laws supposedly intended to protect women from "dangerous" clinics will have accomplished. This is what the so-called pro-life movement will have done for "life. — Katha Pollitt

When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies. — Katha Pollitt

though he's wrong about how these methods work. It's religion - facts don't matter, especially when the facts involve women's liberty. — Katha Pollitt

Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman's body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer. — Katha Pollitt

That women want early abortion, that many women prefer medication to surgery, that especially in rural areas it would be a lot simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a prescription from their local OBGYN or GP than to travel long distances to a clinic, that it would be a good thing to free women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters - none of that mattered. What women want in their abortion care is simply not important. — Katha Pollitt

We think we value mothers in America, but we don't. We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country - why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies: Don't they know how annoying they are, with their yoga, their catfights over diapers and breastfeeding, their designer strollers that take up half the sidewalk so that people with important places to go have to take several extra steps? — Katha Pollitt

And that is close to saying that a woman can have no needs, desires, purpose, or calling so compelling and so important that she should not set it aside in an instant, because of a stray sperm. — Katha Pollitt

Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in. — Katha Pollitt

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. — Katha Pollitt

Old, in America, is not a good thing to be. — Katha Pollitt

A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men ... It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience. — Katha Pollitt

Contrary to the popular stereotype of abortion-seeking women as promiscuous teenagers or child-hating professionals, around 6 in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers. — Katha Pollitt

Thanks to feminism, women can now acquire status in two ways: through marriage or their own achievements. Cure cancer or marry the man who does, either way society will applaud. Unless he marries into the British royal family, it doesn't work that way for men. Wives shed no glory on their husbands. Having tea with Nancy Reagan is an honor; having tea with Denis Thatcher is a joke. — Katha Pollitt

According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the US Preventative Services Task Force, there is no medical reason for a gynecological exam to get a prescription for the Pill, with an annual repeat in order to renew it.13 — Katha Pollitt

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie. — Katha Pollitt

A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband - in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn't her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? — Katha Pollitt

Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf. — Katha Pollitt

Every inch of progress is won in struggle. — Katha Pollitt

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life - a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world? — Katha Pollitt

In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state. — Katha Pollitt

Pro-choicers often say no one is "pro-abortion," but what is so virtuous about adding another child to the ones you're already overwhelmed by? Why do we make young women feel guilty for wanting to feel ready for motherhood before they have a baby? Isn't it a good thing that women think carefully about what it means to bring a child into this world - what, for example, it means to the children she already has? — Katha Pollitt

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it's good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we're trying to combat. — Katha Pollitt