Reproductive 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

Glucocorticoid treatments that had destroyed her reproductive — Dan Brown

If women took up arms to defend their reproductive rights, the GOP would ban assault rifles yesterday. — Steve Marmel

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth. — Erica Jong

I love cooking for men and making love with them'not just reproductive lovemaking but I like sex for the sake of freaking out with men. — Kola Boof

Marching with over a million women in support of our reproductive rights was one of the most empowering things I have done, both as a woman and as a Member of Congress. — Sheila Jackson Lee

Hollywood usually guesses that extraterrestrials would only be interested in one of three things: (1) They want to breed with us, because their own reproductive machinery is on the blink; (2) They want Earth's resources; or (3) They want the Earth. All of it. — Seth Shostak

People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential - the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. — Matt Ridley

Reproductive freedom means economic freedom. And that's what this debate is about. — Diana DeGette

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not. — Germaine Greer

Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent? — James Madison

The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation. Woman have been chattels to man as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of woman. He owns you - he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership - he owns you inside out. — Andrea Dworkin

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

Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder. — Christopher Hitchens

As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom. — Evelyn Underhill

Biological age, I think because I've been taking care of myself for so long I know not just my reproductive organs but my heart, you know, are much younger than - than what I am. — Cheryl Tiegs

We are not defined as much by our reproductive organs, as we are by how we feel about them. — Michael Makai

My mother was a great advocate of women's rights, a member of the League of Women's Voters and lifelong member of Planned Parenthood and an advocate of a woman's rights in terms of reproductive issues. She was also a founding member of Common Cause in the state of Indiana. — Kathryn Lasky

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system — Haruki Murakami

I wait. I don't know how long it will take his reproductive organs to decide life is worth living again, but I'm stuck here until they do. — Jessica Martinez

For Democrats to reduce women to beggars for cheap government-funded birth control is demeaning to the women that I know who are far more complicated than their libido and the management of their reproductive system. — Mike Huckabee

Many men have children, but not many children have 'Fathers'. Age releases to you reproductive skills. Fatherhood requires LEADERSHIP skills — Fela Durotoye

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance). — Stephen Jay Gould

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

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner. — Edward Abbey

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function. — Judith Butler

The dualistic presuppositions of the revisionist position are fully on display in the frequent references by Macedo and others to sexual organs as "equipment." 60 Neither sperm nor eggs, neither penises nor vaginas, are properly discussed in ethical discourse in such terms. Nor are reproductive and other bodily organs "used" by persons considered as somehow standing over and apart from these and other aspects of their personal reality. In fact, where a person treats his body as mere equipment, a mere means to extrinsic ends, the existential sundering of the bodily and conscious dimensions of the self that he effects by his choices and actions brings with it a certain self-alienation, a damaging of the good of personal self-integration. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

The systematic dismantling of reproductive rights, much like the takedown of collective bargaining, has been taking place in full view. — Garry Trudeau

Maybe I'm a bad feminist, but I am deeply committed to the issues important to the feminist movement. I have strong opinions about misogyny, institutional sexism that consistently places women at a disadvantage, the inequity in pay, the cult of beauty and thinness, the repeated attacks on reproductive freedom, violence against women, and on and on. I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism. — Roxane Gay

Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth. — Katherine Dunn

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment. — Keith Henson

All I'm saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it's not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that's not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it's had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. — Greg Egan

When women and families have access to reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion care, they have children when the time is right for them and build stronger families and lives. — Dennis S. Ross

Please accept the fact that people do not change over time.The elderly are, in reality, age tikes.Conversely, the young are juvenile codgers.Granted, we might develop some skills, achieve some profound insights over a lifetime, but by and large who you are at eighty-five is who you were at five.One is either born intelligent or not.The body ages, grows, passes through near-lunatic phases of reproductive frenzy, but you are born and die the same person. — Chuck Palahniuk

There are two kinds of cloning right now. One is therapeutic cloning which is for coming up with cures for life threatening, really, really awful diseases. Then there is reproductive cloning, which is to make a human being out of your DNA and a donor egg. — Mary Tyler Moore

Not since before Roe v. Wade has a law or court decision had the potential to devastate access to reproductive health care on such a sweeping scale. — Nancy Northup

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework. — Jennifer Weiner

For all we know, our ancestors may have had better reproductive success not because they were smart, but because they were emotionally sensitive, dynamically moody, and ridden with anxiety. In other words, it makes sense to hold up an evolutionary lens to mental disorders because they might not be disorders at all, but adaptations. — Meredith F. Small

If you have fathered a child, if you have given birth, if sex is a source of healthy pleasure, thank your pelvis and your reproductive organs for allowing you to feel the creative rhythms of life. — Elizabeth Lesser

Reproductive freedom is not just the ability not to have a child through birth control. It's the ability to have one if and when you want. — Pamela Madsen

I can think of no sadder example of our food paradigm than two posters taped to the window of a California IHOP. One is a colorful photo of pancakes heaped with bananas, strawberries, nuts, syrups and whipped cream with the caption, 'Welcome to Paradise.' Lower down, an 8x10 photocopy states: 'Chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in food or beverages sold here.' Such signs are posted on many fast-food outlets. Heaven isn't a place on earth, at least not at these drive-throughs. — Adam Leith Gollner

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence. — Satoshi Kanazawa

I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman's reproductive existence. — Jamaica Kincaid

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. — Kevin Kelly

Ask any woman and she'll tell you: health care for women is more expensive than it is for men. In fact, during their reproductive years, women spend 68% more on health care than men do. — Rod Blagojevich

Iran's experience shows that when religious scholars and UNFPA work together to solve reproductive health issues, there can be excellent results. — Hossein Malek-Afzali

Losing their reproductive rights is the first step to how women live in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. — Patricia Richardson

Every one of you sitting here today is carrying at least 500 measurable chemicals in your body that were never in anybody's body before the 1920s ... We have dusted the globe with man-made chemicals that can undermine the development of the brain and behavior, and the endocrine, immune and reproductive systems, vital systems that assure perpetuity ... Everyone is exposed. — Theo Colborn

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own. — Angela Carter

If the Democrats want to insult women by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. — Mike Huckabee

Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say "Well it's only symbolic that women are nature", it's like no, it's not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can't get more like nature than that, in fact it's the very definition of nature. — Jordan B. Peterson

Because we spoke so loudly, opponents of reproductive health access demonized and smeared me and others on the public airwaves. These smears are obvious attempts to distract from meaningful policy discussions and to silence women's voices regarding their own health care. — Sandra Fluke

When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications. — Sheldon Whitehouse

He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn't tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn't tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn't recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn't say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside. — Piper Kerman

The argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning. — David Baltimore

The greatest mischief of medicine has occurred because life was not honored. Women have been robbed of the glory of their own bodies with, in recent times, removal and mutilation of reproductive organs and breasts, and the treatment of natural passages of life -- birthing, menstruation, menopause -- as disease. — Jeanne Achterberg

Magic and its remedies deal with borders, markers, distinctions, insides and outsides, the limits of bodies, and also that which breaches these boundaries; bodily fluids, exchanges of objects through bodies and across thresholds, words that pass through the guard of the ear and enter the mind of the hearer. Women's bodies by virtue of their reproductive capacities, are seen as more open, more grotesque, less autonomous — Diane Purkiss

No, I'm the human here. I'm the life at stake. I'm the one with fingernails, who feels pain.

Me. — Alicen Grey

Some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts. — Mary Norris

The worms were beautifully drawn, with their nervous systems and reproductive organs shaded in different colors of highlighter, but the artist had also given them big goofy smiling faces. Grotesque but lovable in a cross-eyed way. — L.J.Smith

That was some powerful shit. Like mind and pussy-numbing, fuckilepsy inducing, reproductive organ-exploding powerful. You really are some kind of flogger wielding sex God. — Ella Dominguez

I decided ... I was going to be a labor and delivery consultant. I was going to stand next to every single woman in labor and every time.. the woman's husband said something stupid like, "Just breathe through the pain," it would be my job to squeeze the living fuck out of their reproductive organs until they were curled up in the fetal position ... and I'd say "Just breathe through the pain, asshole! — Tara Sivec

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't - and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally. — Daniel Quinn

We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity. — C.D. Darlington

As I was to learn, reproductive urges will serve as an alibi for just about anything. — Nell Zink

My hope is that feminist, racial justice, reproductive rights and LGBT movements build a coalition that centers on the lives of women who lead intersectional lives and too often fall in between the cracks of these narrow mission statements. — Janet Mock

Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success. — Keith Henson

When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they're doing so for purely selfish reasons. It's the human equivalent of a puppy dog's face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, 'please lower my taxes.' — Greg Gutfeld

She wished that these kinds of advances in reproductive medicine had been available to her. But then the embryo that had developed into Anna would've been discarded. — Lisa Genova

I am dedicated to ensuring reproductive health and freedom for all. Please join me in supporting Planned Parenthood's vital work to protect access to reproductive health care and real sex education worldwide. — Kathleen Turner

Will you have kids?"
"You make such an attractive case for the reproductive plunge. I don't know, Duncan. Childhood is so exhausting."
"As a parent?"
"I mean as the child. Not sure it's fair to drop somebody else into life without giving them a choice in the matter."
"You'll find it's kind of tough to canvass the opinion of sperm."
"I prefer asking the eggs - they're more articulate. Anyway, aren't you the guy who's always bemoaning the future of humanity? Saying how the worst jerks always have millions of babies, meaning the world gets worse every generation?"
"Exactly why decent people need to have kids. — Tom Rachman

Her [Jurdge Sandra Day O'Connor] judgment has also been critical in protecting our environmental rights. She joined in 5-4 majorities affirming reproductive freedom and religious freedom and the Voting Rights Act. — Patrick Leahy

We still live in a world where many men are pissed off that women choose to be powerful equals rather than submissive objects of sexual release. I am a human. A human being. Who cares how my body randomly decided to generate its reproductive organs in utero? I am not here with the obligation and purpose of being sexually appealing to another human being. I am here to get shit done. — Jennifer DeLucy

We may abandon a holistic, metaphysical ideal of natural law reconciled with cultural configurations; but we cannot abandon a vision of a humanity freed from such pathologies without simultaneously siding with the worst kind of system-reproductive education. — Mark Murphy

Sexual and reproductive health and rights are universal human rights!They are an indivisible part of the broader human rights and development equation. Their particular power resides in the fact that they deal with the most intimate aspects of our identities as individuals and enable human dignity, which is dependent on control of our bodies, desires and aspirations. — Babatunde Osotimehin

If women die in childbed, that does no harm. It is what they were made for. — Martin Luther

In Connecticut, for example, a man confessed to having had sexual relations with a variety of animals since the age of ten; Massachusetts executed several teenage boys for buggery. Sexual relations with animals required harsh punishment, for colonists believed that these unions could have reproductive consequences. The mating of humans and animals, they feared, would produce monstrous offspring. For this reason, colonists insisted on punishing not only the man but also the beast, who might bear such monsters. — John D'Emilio

My parents raised me that you never ask people about their reproductive plans. "You don't know their situation," my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn't even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald's food turns into cold nonfood. — Tina Fey

I have consistently supported laws ensuring women are able to make their own health care decisions, and I will continue to protect women's access to contraceptives and reproductive health care. — Dan Maffei

As the largest contributor to the United Nations and funder of international family planning, the U.S. is in a unique position to continue to lead the global agenda and place reproductive health at its core. — Mike Quigley

Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions - only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain - is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states. I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his clinic. He says: "Of course, I'm there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty." In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being "pro-life. — Gloria Steinem

Women, justifiably, feel vulnerable at a time so many years after their journey for reproductive freedom started. — Sarah Weddington

Now, anyway, we knew who was which blood type.
In addition to the beating he'd received from Chloe, Max was also starting to blister up (type A). The McKinley twins were hiding from us - they clearly had the paranoia (type AB). Ulysses was chattering to himself in Spanish, a rapid-fire monologue that made me pretty sure he had the paranoia type - type AB - as well as the twins.
Batiste had type B, the blood type that exhibited no symptoms, as did Alex, Jake, and Sahalia (sterility and reproductive failure - hooray!).
"We have to get them clean," Brayden said.
"You think?" I sort of shouted at him (type O). — Emmy Laybourne

Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but — William Graham Sumner

This is just a wacky idea I had, but maybe it's not a coincidence that, in a country where half the population's normal reproductive functions are stigmatized, American uterus- and vagina-havers are still fighting tooth and nail to have those same reproductive systems fully covered by the health insurance that we pay for. — Lindy West

Doing some mental maths, Kat realised she wasn't even ovulating, the time of month when hormones and instinct reminded her that she was at the end of a very long, evolutionary line of successful couplings on the savannah. At that time, even newsreaders could suddenly morph into enticing reproductive candidates. — Susan Lattwein

There's a misconception that survival of the fittest means survival of the most aggressive. The adjective 'Darwinian' used to refer to ruthless competition; you used to read that in business journals. But that's not what Darwinian means to a biologist; it's whatever leads to reproductive success. — Steven Pinker

Under reverent, patient care, the wild seed gradually relinquishes its protective husk and entrusts its reproductive life to human hands.(thus) this sacred law and covenant with Mother Earth; Respectful care brings abundance. If you take, you must give back-Return the gift. — Marilou Awiakta

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions. — Judith Butler

What is your least favorite part of the male anatomy?" "Uh ... what?" "Come on." I nudged her shoulder. "You have to have a least favorite part." Marie stared at me for a beat then blinked rapidly. "Really? I just pour out my heart to you and ... ." "Balls," Ashley announced unceremoniously from her place on the floor. Elizabeth snickered. "Oh, my lord." Marie covered her face with her hands and shook her head. I ignored her and leaned closer to Ashley. "I know, right? I mean, shouldn't those things be on the inside?" Janie's thoughtfully distracted voice chimed in. "I feel like the rest of the male body makes a lot of sense. And then ... balls." "Yes!" "It makes me think maybe God is an alien or ran out of alluring parts before he got to the male reproductive system." "They never look nice; it's basically impossible. You can't dress them up, and I've seen a lot of balls in the ER. I've never seen a man's balls and thought to myself, Now that guy has a great set of testicles — Penny Reid

Please don't forget: I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece. I am also not a uterus riding around in a meat incubator. There is no substantive difference between the repulsive campaign to separate women's bodies from their reproductive systems - perpetuating the lie that abortion and birth control are not healthcare - and the repulsive campaign to convince women that they and their body size are separate, alienated entities. Both say, "Your body is not yours." Both demand, "Beg for your humanity." Both insist, "Your autonomy is conditional." This is why fat is a feminist issue. All — Lindy West

So that would be a classic mixed message to young women: you should look a certain way that's going to destroy your reproductive system and your sexual appetite, but at the same time, you should be interested in sex! — Susie Bright

Historic fascists generally argued that women's primary function was domestic and reproductive. National-populists — Kevin Passmore

Twenty years later, twenty years after I joined the women's movement, we're still talking about the same issues. We're still talking about reproductive rights for women, and we're still talking about getting equal pay for women. And that's just frustrating. — Corin Tucker

I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood") — William S. Wilson

used today are wreaking havoc on all of us, particularly on young children whose brains, immune systems, reproductive systems, and lungs are growing rapidly. "We have abundant — Alan Bell

Killing is fundamentally in our nature because over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition, — David Buss

The Church's basic moral principle regarding reproductive technologies is this: if a given technology assists the marital embrace in achieving its natural end, it can be morally acceptable, even praiseworthy. However, if it replaces the marital embrace as the means by which the child is conceived, it's not in keeping with God's design. — Christopher West

I don't know what these Republican congressmen drink that make them experts on women's reproductive health. — Jackie Speier