- Andrusko, Dave
- University of Guelph history professor Keith Cassidy places the
pro-life movement "Firmly Within The
Historic Liberal Tradition Of Respect For The Indivisibility Of Human
Rights" in an interview with National Right to Life News.
- Casey,
Robert
- "In short, our response as a party should be to work to solve the
crises that produce crisis pregnancies, and work to make life worth living
for mother and child, rather than victimize the child as a way of dealing
with the crisis. I am convinced that this approach, a mainstream
Democratic approach, commands the strong support of the American people,
and presents a sharp and compassionate contrast to the Republican abortion
position which offers no real hope or commitment to mother or child." --
Statement to the Democratic National
Committee Platform Hearing, 1992
"For like the practice of slavery, and like the Jim Crow laws of
the not-so-distant past, the abortion issue raises the most fundamental
questions of justice -- questions that cannot be avoided, and that cannot
be resolved by judicial fiat. Who belongs to the community of the commonly
protected? Whose rights will we acknowledge? Whose human dignity will we
respect? For whose well-being will we, as a people, assume
responsibility?" -- A New American
Compact; Caring About Women, Caring for the Unborn
"Among the "herd of independent minds" who make up our opinion
leaders, abortion may be taken as a mark of progress. But most Americans
have not followed ... For we know -- and this used to be the credo of my
party -- that progress can never come by exploiting or sacrificing any one
class of people. Progress is a hollow word unless everyone is
counted in and no one written off, especially the most weak and vulnerable
among us." -- Dred Scott, Again
- Cruz-Uribe,
David
- "The purpose of this essay is to consider, through a series of
vignettes, what it means to be pro-life in an environment which is
reflexively pro-choice." -- Reflections of a
Pro-Life Academic
- Cummings,
Mike
- "That is the real mission of liberalism: to provide for and protect
the least and most defenseless of God's creatures, not eliminate them." --
A Liberal for
Life.
- Eller,
Kyle
- "It's not that there aren't others like me. In fact, according to the
National Pro-Life Democrats Committee, a national poll from 1998 showed
that 38 percent of Democrats -- and 40 percent of Democrat women -- took a
pro-life position on abortion, to one degree or another. It's that these
voices are ignored. Don't expect 38 percent, or 5 percent, of Democratic
candidates to endorse those views. The hypocrisy of the Democratic party,
which poses as defender of the weak but sanctions the slaughter of more
than a million of the most defenseless people on Earth annually, appalls
and sickens me." -- Surprise,
surprise -- another election spoiled by abortion (originally
published in the Duluth Budgeteer
News).
- Estabrook, Carl
"If the Left continues to draw out the
implication of its principles, it will discover the marginalization of the
unborn and unwanted as for example it discovered the marginalization of
women in the first and second waves of feminism in the 19th and 20th
centuries. And it's reasonable to suspect that the discovery will take as
long and involve as many contradictions as that concerning women did --
and does." -- Abortion and the
Left
"The "pro-troops" line echoes what is perhaps
the most successful rhetorical strategy in modern politics, "pro-choice."
In each case attention is shifted away from a questionable action toward
the actor, for whom sympathy is solicited. But everyone knows that
"pro-troops" is an assertion of the legitimacy of the war, just as
"pro-choice" is a contention that abortion is ethical." -- Support Our
Euphemism
- Hall, Tony
- "The moral test of government, Hubert Humphrey said, is how that
government treats those that are in the dawn of life, the children; those
who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the
shadows of life, the sick." -- Speech before
the 1996 Democratic National Convention
- Hentoff, Nat
- "And then I heard the head of the Reproductive Freedom Rights unit of
the ACLU saying - this was at the same time as the Baby Jane Doe story was
developing on Long Island - at a forum, "I don't know what all this fuss
is about. Dealing with these handicapped infants is really an extension of
women's reproductive freedom rights, women's right to control their own
bodies." [...] So for the first time, I began to pay attention to the
"slippery slope" warnings of pro-lifers I read about or had seen on
television. -- The
Indivisible Fight for Life
"Robert Casey, who died on May 30 at age 68, was a Democrat
fiercely committed to his party's tradition of protecting society's most
vulnerable. And, for that, his party made him a pariah. " -- Life of the
Party
"The women on the lecture committee ... had decided that there was a
limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was
outside that limit." -- Pro-Choice
Bigots
- Holtz, Ari
- "But I venture that [abortion] is a short-sighted method of
maintaining female control and fighting the white powerful male
government. To truly exercise our liberalism we would empower through
community and collectivism." -- Can I be a
liberal and pro-life?
- Kelly, Kevin
- "I think considering the fetus a human being would keep our
definitions of "human' wide. We would be less likely to narrow our
acceptance of who is human, to cast away those not formed like us. As it
is, we find it particularly tempting to eliminate those who don't meet our
specifications (white, extra-bright, no defects) while they are yet
voiceless and unseen, whereas once they are born we are obliged to accept
and adapt to their otherness. Imagine a world where the misshapened were
not permitted to live, where everyone was "normal.' That's the opposite of
a place where the fetus is treated as a human being." -- The
consequences of treating a fetus as a human being
- Kopp, Marilyn Dickstein
- "Like the death penalty and military aggression, abortion reflects
society's tendency to solve problems by violently disposing of those who
present the problems. Giving voice to the voiceless -- not exerting lethal
control over them -- always has been a priority of the left." -- Opinion Piece from a
Pro-Life Feminist.
- Lukash,
Jayelle
- "When some miserable excuse for a politician tells us we need ex-gay
ministries instead of civil rights protections, we know full well what
s/he's doing. Getting rid of us makes their problems go away, not ours. We
recognize that they hate us. But when some doctor or politician offers us
the choice to undergo an emotionally and physically painful surgery, to
get our wombs scraped out or take pills that might make us hemorrhage to
death, to treat a natural function of a womans body as a tragedy and our
children as our enemies -- why, we call them our friends! I demand better
friends and better choices." -- Less Than Human (link broken; I'm looking
for a replacement)
- McKenna, George
- "... the proper philosophical home for pro-lifers right now is the
liberal wing of the Democratic Party. [...] Democrats know that racism,
like abortion, cannot be abolished by governmental fiat. But they also
know that it is wrong to subsidize racist teachings publicly or to
tolerate racist speech in public institutions or to permit racist
practices in large-scale "private" enterprises. Democrats also insist
that government has a duty to take the lead in condemning racism and
educating our youth about its dangers. In other words, the same
formula--grudgingly tolerate, restrict, discourage--that I have applied to
abortion is what liberal Democrats have been using to combat racism over
the past generation." -- On
Abortion: A Lincolnian Position
"But that still would not answer the question of why they, the
ideologically liberal voters and Democratic contributors, are so angrily
determined to link liberalism with "abortion rights." The real answer, I
think, is that, whatever the philosophical merits of the pro-life
position, whatever its doctrinal compatibility with liberalism, pro-life
has become identified with the "outsiders" -- the strangers, the
barbarians, the people who talk funny." -- Why
They Help Them Lie
- Meehan, Mary
- "The abortion issue, more than most, illustrates the occasional
tendency of the Left to become so enthusiastic over what is called a
"reform" that it forgets to think the issue through. It is ironic that so
many on the Left have done on abortion what the conservatives and Cold War
liberals did on Vietnam: They marched off in the wrong direction, to fight
the wrong war, against the wrong people." -- Abortion:
The Left has betrayed the sanctity of life
- Rodman, Monika and Kathleen Buckley
- "The mere recognition of an educated and articulate female leadership
at the helm of the anti-abortion movement would subvert the free and easy
way in which abortion-rights leaders purport to speak for all women.
Women who exercise anti-abortion leadership do so not in spite of our
gender, but because of it." -- Women
and Abortion: Another Voice.
- Roth, Jen
- "As someone whose pro-life views stem from the radical notion that all
human beings have equal human rights and dignity, I cannot understand how
looking down upon and being cruel to another group of human beings can be
considered pro-life. " -- Anti-gay activists
don't (and shouldn't) speak for all pro-lifers
"Pro-life feminism is the future because it promises to expand, rather
than contract, the circle of humanity. It promises truly equal human
rights for all human beings, not just those deemed worthy by the powerful.
That spirit places pro-life feminism in harmony with all other movements
for social progress." -- Pro-life feminism
is the future
"I find the acceptance of abortion as a response to a sexist society to
be inconsistent with humanist ideals. Humanism values the inherent worth
and dignity of every human being. It affirms that moral standards should
be based on the effect of our actions on our fellow human beings. It
embraces the use of reason and repudiates the use of violence to settle
disputes. Abortion is an ancient, backwards practice which is not worthy
of those ideals. Legal or not, we must progress beyond it." -- A
Secular Case Against Abortion
Letters I've written
- Shields, Mark
- "I am a pro-life liberal who agrees with pro-choice Rep. Barney Frank,
D-Mass., in his criticism that too many pro-lifers act as though life
began at conception and ended at birth. It is entirely reasonable to
question how we can call ourselves pro-life if we do not defend and
protect the powerless among us, the hungry and the homeless, the
undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker." -- The abortion
debate: Life does not end at birth
- Trageser,
Jim
- "But is it not the open and honest recognition that we are all
interdependent that is at the heart of a progressive value system? That
none of us can exist without our brothers and sisters? That, indeed, no
man is an island? It is indeed the exact opposite value that is at the
heart of the argument in favor of legalized abortion and euthanasia: I am
an island, sovereign to myself, with no obligations to the greater society
around me." -- The Left's
surrender on issues of human value. Originally published in The American Reporter.
"In short, to capture the essence of leftist opposition to abortion as
a form of birth control, one might say thus: A house of freedom cannot be
built on a foundation of violence." -- The voice of
the liberal, pro-feminist anti-abortionists is 'lost' in the
debate
- Vincent, Norah
- "The "pro-choice" lobby assumes that people, especially those living
in poverty, are no more capable than stray cats of exercising control over
their reproductive habits. Among such creatures, goes the theory,
unplanned pregnancies are as inevitable as they are in a barn. Thus,
preventing the births of unwanted children means "keeping abortion safe
and legal," or, to put it less euphemistically, resorting to fetal
disposal after the coital fact." -- Aborting
Crime
"Thirty-seven percent of surveyed women with high school educations
were pro-choice, while those who completed four years of college were 73
percent pro-choice. It isn't just education that's changing so many
women's minds. The stories some women tell suggest that it's also biased
counseling and ideological pressure." -- Spread
'Em
- Volkhardt, Sonya
- "The image itself was actually rather
beautiful; the poster displayed an artful black and white photograph of
a young pregnant woman's rounded belly. It stopped just beneath her
breasts, and extended far enough down her body to include her small,
delicate hands, folded beneath her womb. It's an evocative image; are
those hands supporting her child? Sheltering it? Offering its potential
out to the world? Or are we meant to contrast their pale fragility with
the enormous creative power displayed by her pregnant state?
Unfortunately, we're meant to think none of those things; the caption
below this image read "If you're embarrassed by a pimple, try explaining
this"." -- Thoughts on a
Poster (just one of several great articles at Sonya's site)
- Westberg, Jenny
- "Because I hold ... "anti-choice" ideas, I'm given to understand that
I'm not allowed to be part of the feminist movement. Now, it's nothing new
for me to have my ideas dismissed out of hand, but generally it's been by
smug, patronizing testosterone-drunk MEN!" -- Apologia of a Pro-Life Feminist.
Originally published in Blue Stocking Magazine.
- Winn, Sally
- "The pro-life left believes that laws by themselves will not end
abortion. Although we want to see these laws, we feel it is more important
to address the causes of abortion. A law to ban abortion will not provide
health care to a pregnant woman, it won't open a day care center, and it
will not give someone a job or flexible work hours. Most importantly, it
will not prevent a crisis pregnancy." -- The Pro-Life View From the
Left.