Katha Pollitt Quotes
Abortion needs to be claimed as a positive, social good. It is an essential option for women—not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women—and thus benefits society as a whole.
Other society benefits that proponents of legal abortion as the constitution provides have enumerated include reducing the number of unwanted children, reducing the number of children in poverty and the health and other costs that accompany them, reducing the financial burdens of couples who cannot afford a child at the time, preventing high school and college dropouts, reducing the health costs of women who have botched illegal abortions.
Katha Politt, Feminist Poet, Essayist & Critic, Reclaiming Abortion Rights, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Italian women have been relatively inactive in political affairs. It took issues like abortion and contraception to galvanize Italian women into political activism. 50,000 women marched in this demonstration. Even though Italy is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and the Vatican is a major opponent of birth control and abortion, both soon become legal in Catholic Italy despite the opposition of the Vatican.
This quotation is one of the best examples of political flip flopping and expedience. The quotation taken by itself is not unusual and is the same position as political candidates in Massachusetts have taken for years regardless of political party. Romney was then running for the Senate—a race that he lost. Later he ran for Governor on the same position and won. However in 2008, he decided to run for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. However, at that time, the Christian Religious Right had sufficient clout within the Republican party that no one with Romney’s position on abortion would be likely to win the nomination. So Romney reversed his position on abortion and when accused of flip-flopping for political expediency, claimed that he had had an epiphany regarding abortion. However as this quotation shows, he had always believed that the personal abortion views of candidates should NOT be brought into the campaign. However along with his epiphany on abortion itself, he conveniently now claimed every candidate should constantly declare in his campaigning his position on abortion. He also flip flopped on many other issues including repudiating the Obama Health Care reform which was modeled after the very successful program he had supported when Governor. He changed on so many issues that even the Christian Right Wing Fundamentalists, whose political positions he espoused did not always trust him, nor did most of the moderates and liberals whose views he used to claim when it was politically advantageous to do so.
At the time the United States was the only developed country where the early abortion drugs were not available without a doctor's prescription. Ironically the drugs were even safer than the previous surgical abortion procedures where were already extremely safe. But the politics of the "culture wars" at the time obstructed scientific and medical decision making at the FDA.
Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues from a left-leaning perspective, including abortion, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.
