The 25 All-Time Greatest Pro-Choice Quotes

"No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body." —Margaret Sanger

Updated 9 years ago, July 17, 2015

1.

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
—Margaret Sanger

2.

Seventy-seven percent of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant.
—Planned Parenthood advertisement

3.

No woman has an abortion for fun.
—Elizabeth Joan Smith

4.

Against abortion? Don’t have one.
—Anonymous

5.

How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelet?
—George Carlin

6.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg

7.

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
—Florynce Kennedy

8.

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.
—Frederica Mathewes-Green

9.

Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.
—Karl Kraus

10.

It’s real easy to say you’re 100% against abortion when you’ll never have to make that decision.
—Anonymous

11.

Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women’s health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back…to the back alley?
—Lisa Edelstein

12.

Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.
—Ayelet Waldman

13.

Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family.
—Peter Kreeft

14.

In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald’s to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took responsibility for my actions. I messed up, had sex without contraception, and got pregnant at 15.
—Kathleen Hanna

15.

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

16.

If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot.
—Christiane Northrup

17.

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
—Camille Paglia

18.

After listening to Rick Santorum, I’m now for late-term abortions (say up to age 53).
—Quentin R. Bufogle

19.

The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do.
—Howard Dean

20.

What is this ban on abortion—it is a survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, burning, branding, mutilation, stoning, of all the grip of ownership and superstition come down on woman, thousands of years ago.
—Stella Brown

21.

I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.
—Caitlin Moran

22.

If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine.
—Michael Jay Tucker

23.

It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans.
—Max Frisch

24.

I consider abortion to be a deeply personal and intimate issue for women and I don’t believe male legislators should even vote on the issue.
—Alan K. Simpson

25.

If every woman who’s had an abortion took tomorrow off in protest, America would grind to a halt. And that would be symbolic: because women grind to a halt if they are not in control of their fertility.
—Caitlin Moran