Rants & Raves

"I am constantly aware that I am working for a giant corporation, and that’s frustrating. In the first season, my character became pregnant and she wasn’t going to have the baby. But she couldn’t have an abortion; she had to lose the baby. And whenever you see a character on TV lose a baby, it’s because someone is saying you can’t have an abortion on television. You can’t even say the … word. You have to call it a procedure. I find it all so intensely frustrating and limiting — it’s like the current administration and the religious right vilifying things that are real and shouldn’t be judged."
— Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh, Time Out New York, September 7, 2006

"Let us unite around a common goal of reducing the amount of abortions. ....Not by making them illegal as many are attempting to do, or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions."
— Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), speaking to members of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, The New York Times, June 14, 2006

"It's ... alarming that they make no allowance for a doctor's judgment that carrying a pregnancy to term could injure a woman's health. But these are the burdens some abortion foes would impose on others in the name of their own particular ideology. Shame."

— Op-ed writer Scot Lehigh on the bill passed on Feb 22, 2006, by the South Dakota legislature that bans most abortions in South Dakota without including an exception for a case in which the life of the woman would be jeopardized, Boston Globe, March 3, 2006

"Believing a woman's place is in the home, [anti-abortion extremists] have declared war on women's rights. A woman who cannot control her own reproduction is hardly in a position to run for the U.S. Senate, start her own company or join the military."

— Cynthia Tucker, editorial in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 22, 2006

"We are here to advocate that the decision as to whether or not a particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual; that, in fact, she has a constitutional right to make that decision for herself."

— Sarah Weddington, arguing the landmark case Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, decided on January 22, 1973, granting women the right to safe, legal abortion nationwide.

"The rise and righteous indignation of the powerful religious right have been fueled by the transformation of women's lives. So many of the objections to legal abortion over the past 30 years have been objections to female sexual freedom."

— Anna Quindlen, questioning the motivation of abortion opponents, Newsweek, July 11, 2005

"One of the things we're very proud of at Planned Parenthood is we don't bring any of our personal bias into our jobs. We believe women should be accurately informed of all their pregnancy choices. There has been a lot of misinformation handed out in many of these ["crisis pregnancy"] centers, and ... they're scaring women with post-abortion syndrome .... There is no medical evidence of any kind that post-abortion trauma exists ...."

— Beverly Cooper, vice president of public policy for Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, Salt Lake Tribune, July 9, 2005

"Making abortion illegal never has and never will stop women from having abortions."

— Kate Looby, clinical operations director at Planned Parenthood of Minnesota North Dakota South Dakota, on legislation in South Dakota that would make it a felony to perform abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned, AP, February 11, 2005

"[A]bortion opponents held the 32nd 'March for Life.' We barely notice the way the word 'life' was hijacked and locked in the right-wing dictionary. 'Life' now means fetal life; life begins with conception and ends with birth."

— Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, January 27, 2005

"Forced motherhood should not be the punishment for failed contraception or a contraceptive lapse, or for being human. Women are more than their wombs."

— Adele Horin, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 2004

"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body."
— Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920)