Legal Abortion Quotes & Sayings

Even those who, like me, believe that Roe v. Wade and the decisions elaborating on reproductive rights were constitutionally correct must recognize that, for many on the right, the sudden and relatively sloppily reasoned character of the abortion rulings ... did real damage to the Court's reputation as a relatively neutral arbiter of legal disputes. — Laurence Tribe

In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. — David Sedaris

It's hard for me to believe that just my words on the page are enough. I ought to be out physically keeping abortion safe and legal, restoring the Fourth Amendment, getting clean water back into Kentucky since the Bush Administration has allowed strip miners to fill it all up with slag. The list is endless. Bring it down. Make it small. Make it one thing that you can do. It's very hard for me to remember that. — Sara Paretsky

I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. — Mitt Romney

The root cause of abortion is the failure to be satisfied in God as our supreme love. And, for all the great legal work that needs to be done to protect human life, the greatest work that needs to be done is to spread a passion - a satisfaction for the supremacy of God in all things. That's our calling. — John Piper

The pro-death view should be of interest even to those who do not accept it. One of its valuable features is that it offers a unique challenge to those pro-lifers who reject a legal right to abortion. Whereas a legal pro-choice position does not require a pro-lifer to have an abortion - it allows a choice - a legal pro-life position does prevent a pro-choicer from having an abortion. Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers' commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice. — David Benatar

In my view, the pro-life movement at this point should focus on seeking to reduce the number of abortions. At times it will require political education and legal fights, at times it will require education and the establishment of alternatives to abortion, such as adoption centers. Unfortunately, such measures are sometimes opposed by so-called hard-liners in the pro-life movement. These hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw all abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping some abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing no abortions. — Dinesh D'Souza

One thing, Ms. Gray, is forgotten by this tragedy: the embryo is human, not a nonhuman as the Supreme Court declared. Abortion never was about the poor or about women's rights. It's an ideology with an agenda - and it's a profitable business. So, Ms. Gray, I dare say few politicians will speak that truth for fear of political reprisals. I'm not afraid. Politicians and courts made legal what is a morally reprehensible act of brutality. I call it what it is: judicial tyranny. — J.W. Brazier

The idea that making an activity legal would reduce its incidence is preposterous. This is exactly like the Clintonian statement about wanting to make abortion 'safe, legal and rare.' The most effective way to make something 'rare' is to make it illegal. — Ann Coulter

We respect the individual conscience of every American on the painful issue of abortion, but believe as a matter of law that this decision should be left to a woman, her conscience, her doctor and her God. But abortion should not only be be safe and legal, it should be rare. — William J. Clinton

I do not believe abortion should be legal. — Herman Cain

On behalf of NARAL Pro-Choice America - and our one million member activists - I am honored to be here to talk to you about what's at stake for women in 2012. I am proud to say that the Democratic Party believes that women have the right to choose a safe, legal abortion with dignity and privacy. — Nancy Keenan

Legal abortion will never rest easy on this nation's conscience. — Robert Casey

The advocates of abortion on demand falsely assume two things: that women must suffer if the lives of unborn children are legally protected; and that women can only attain equality by having the legal option of destroying their innocent offspring in the womb. — Robert Casey

The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom. — Pope John Paul II

I believe it should be the legal right of any woman who wants to have an abortion to have one. From the spiritual point of view, I don't see a problem with abortion in that the soul doesn't usually take incarnation until the last month before birth, sometimes not even until the moment of birth. — Frederick Lenz

I did not go to the Supreme Court on behalf of a class of women. I wasn't pursuing any legal remedy to my unwanted pregnancy. I did not go to the federal courts for relief. I went to Sarah Weddington asking her if she knew how I could obtain an abortion. She and Linda Coffey said they didn't know where to get one. They lied to me just like I lied to them. Sarah already had an abortion. She knew where to get one. Sarah and Linda were just looking for somebody, anybody, to further their own agenda. I was their willing dupe. For this, I will forever be ashamed. — Norma McCorvey

While Texas women have the right to safe, legal abortion, in reality there are already very few facilities in Texas to provide this essential care. In 2008, 92 percent of Texas counties had no abortion provider. — Wendy Davis

I believe abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v Wade has been the law for 20 years that we should sustain and support it. And I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice. We can believe what we want, but will will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me waivering on that. — Mitt Romney

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears. — Shirley Chisholm

Here is the trap you are in ... And it's not my trap - I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you - because you know how to perform them - have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice - and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you. — John Irving

For me, life is the most beautiful gift of God to mankind, therefore people and nations who destroy life by abortion and euthanasia are the poorest. I do not say legal or illegal, but I think that no human hand should be raised to kill life, since life is God's life in us, even in an unborn child. — Mother Teresa

History is full of wrongs done the wife by legal robbery on the part of the husband. I hesitate not to assert that most of this crime of child murder, abortion, infanticide, lies at the door of the male sex. — Matilda Joslyn Gage

There comes a time when a human being has to either face evil or admit to allowing it. Abortion is legal in the United States, but it should not be celebrated or used as a political tool. Viable babies are human beings. — Bill O'Reilly

There was no mistake in us making abortion legal and available on demand. That was what we call progress. Just like it was no mistake that we abolished institutional racism in this country around the same time. The easy thing to do is lay low, but then are we who we say we are? Do we actually stand for anything, if what we do stand for is under attack and we say nothing? There is nothing to be ashamed of here except to allow a radical and recessive group of people to bully and intimidate our mothers and sisters and daughters for exercising their right of choice. — Mark Ruffalo

Although abortion has been legal nationwide for more than a quarter century, access remains difficult for many women. — David Grimes

In the specific case of abortion, the matter is particularly easy in that no woman wants a late abortion. Once abortion was made legal, the age of the aborted fetus went down. The slope slipped in the other direction. If we legalize RU-486 and other similar new drugs, the age will fall to one week or less and start approaching zero. The slippery slope will slide in the other direction. The only reason we have late abortions is because we make early abortion difficult. — Garrett Hardin

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people. — Gloria Steinem

Those selling abortion don't want them to have [the facts]," Virginia said heatedly. "Besides the Supreme Court doesn't agree with you. They judges seem to think we poor women would fall apart if we knew the facts, so they decided women don't have the right to know the full truth." She shook her head. "They've made it legal to withhold vital information, even when a woman requests it, for heaven's sake! — Francine Rivers

The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education. — Gloria Steinem

Abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare. — William J. Clinton

What some men don't understand is that by opposing policies to reduce violence, promote equal pay and universal healthcare and voting to limit access to contraception and legal abortion, they are relegating women to another century, a time when men ruled exclusively and women were considered property and had to be guided by a firm masculine hand. — Madeleine M. Kunin

Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case. — A.E. Samaan

The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amounts to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder ... — Fannie Lou Hamer

Opponents of legal birth control, including abortion, have tried for decades to play the race card, saying that legal abortion is racist. What they ignore is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966. — Karen DeCrow

AMA report both confirmed the public health benefits of legal abortion and foresaw the public health danger of legislative attempts to turn back the clock on American women. — David A. Grimes, M.D.

A person who is conscientiously pro-choice must understand that he or she is a legal ally, willingly or unwillingly, with the pro-abortion position. If you the reader have taken a pro-choice position to avoid either extreme camp, you must squarely
face the reality that from a legal standpoint you have chosen the pro-abortion camp. — R.C. Sproul

Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible. — Leora Tanenbaum

Any woman should have the right to a safe and legal abortion. — Betty Ford

Prior to Roe , ... whether one could obtain a legal abortion in the face of an unwanted pregnancy was a crap shoot. For 30 years now, it's been a constitutionally guaranteed right — David Garrow

You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion. — Hillary Clinton

Just because something happens to be legal does not make it moral, ethical or right. Abortion is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of a situation where something is legal, but is very much a sin against God. — Al Barry

I think it's important that (Roe v. Wade) remain legal for medical reasons and other reasons. — Laura Bush

I am not saying I will vote against John Ashcroft because he is pro-life, .. But let me say if someone was nominated for attorney general who was vehemently pro choice
who in his or her career spent decades trying to find ways to expand the law abortion at nine months would be perfectly legal
wouldn't you be more upset and raise more of a voice than against a nominee who was simply pro-choice?. — Charles Schumer