Quotes About Birth Control and Abortion

Parents may feel the need to have many babies to be sure that a few survive.

— World Bank, on high infant mortality rate in developing countries

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights — older than our political parties, older than our school system.

— William O. Douglas, on a woman’s right to a legal abortion

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.

— Margaret Sanger

You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.

— Pope Paul VI

Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom?

— Eli Adorno

The best contraception is the word no— repeated frequently.

— Margaret Chase Smith

The Catholic wife is under great pressure...If she uses contraceptives, she is called wicked by her parish priest.  If she follows the advice of her parish priest and refrains from sexual intercourse, she is called cold by her husband.  If she doesn’t take steps, she is called mad by society at large.

— Anne Biezanek

The routine promotion of condoms through advertising has been stopped by networks who are so hypocritically priggish that they refuse to describe disease control as they promote disease transmission.

— Henry A. Waxman

There is no non-arbitrary lines separating a fetus from a child or, indeed, an adult from a human being.

— Byron R. White

I’ve noticed that everyone that is for abortion has already been born.

— Ronald Reagan

The states are not free, under the guise of protecting maternal health or potential life, to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies...Abortion raises moral and spiritual questions over which honorable persons can disagree sincerely and profoundly.  But those disagreements did not then and do not now relieve us of our duty to apply the Constitution faithfully.

— Harry A. Blackman

A father’s interest in having a child— perhaps his only child— may be unmatched by any other interest in his life.  It is truly surprising that the state must assign a greater value to a mother’s decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father’s decision to let it mature into a live child.

— William H. Rehnquist

I realize that the subject of abortion is deeply divisive, with reaction felt more in the emotions than in the mind.  For this reason, dispassionate factual discussions are more beneficial than the tossing about of violent slogans.  I also realize that legalized abortion is far from the ideal solution to unwanted conception.  Yet a lifetime of work in the field has convinced me that liberalized abortion is an absolutely essential tool to ease the lot of many women and families in a tough, tough world.

— Alan Guttmacher

There is an old Puerto Rican saying] that men must do three things during life: plant trees, write books, and have sons.  I wish they would plant more trees and write more books.

— Luis Mu–oz Marin

Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was the fifth.

— Clarence S. Darrow

A society which practices death control must at the same time practice birth control.

— John Rock

One of the biggest things people could do for their descendants would be so sharply limit the number of them.

— Olin Miller

Safe and effective contraception is essential in man’s battle to control his environment.

— Elizabeth Connell

Once you pass into the utilitarianism of abortion, where do you go?  Why do you kill an unborn child after six months and not old people or not criminals or not just every second person in the world?

— Victor Heylen

If my parents had been exposed to today’s ideas of family planning, my brothers Win and David might not have made it.

— John D. Rockefeller III

Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t.  But I don’t believe that the federal government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.

— Jimmy Carter, on the availability of abortions

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

— Gloria Steinem (attrib.)