Muriel Spark Quotes

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

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

Legislative proposals that would enable an employer to determine whether or not a woman's insurance would cover the cost of birth control strikes women as particularly bizarre. Is the boss going to take care of the children that are conceived accidentally? Stop treating us like children. Women are grown ups.

It is the patriotic duty of women to bear four children.

It is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.

If you want to control human reproduction you have to control women’s bodies.

Abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it is not a good idea to bring them into the world.

Bottom line: Contraception does not reduce abortion.

Trying to block women from getting access to contraception or defunding Planned Parenthood is completely nonsensical from a policy standpoint.

World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.

If they are opposed to abortion, they should be for preventing unintended pregnancies.

The public likes to think that women only care about contraception.

One year they asked me to be poster boy - for birth control.

The best contraceptive is the word no - repeated frequently.

I want guys out there to think when they are in the magic moment of lovemaking that if this woman gets pregnant, I'm going to be on a financial hook for the rest of my life.

We all want abstinence. And if I knew how to get abstinence I would do whatever it takes to do that ... Given a choice between hearing my daughter say I'm pregnant or I used a condom, most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.

It is clearly useless to preach the limitation of the family and to conceal the means whereby such limitation may be effected.

I say that this is a dirty, filthy book, and the test of it is that no human being would allow that book on his table, no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have it…the object of it is to enable a person to have sexual intercourse, and not to have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result of that sexual intercourse. That is the only purpose of the book and all the instruction in the other parts of the book leads up to that proposition.

Contraception is satanic.

When contraceptive services are not available to women throughout the world, abortion rates increase.

Probably the easiest thing would be to vasectimize males at the age of 13 after freezing some of their sperm. Then you could unfreeze it only after they have enough money to support a child up to the age of 18.

In America, access to birth control is controlled by those who never use it.

Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

Has knowledge of birth control, so carefully guarded and so secretly practiced by the women of the wealthy class – and so tenaciously withheld from the working women – brought them misery? Rather, has it not promoted greater happiness, greater freedom, greater prosperity and more harmony among them? The women who have this knowledge are the women who have been free to develop, free to enjoy in its best sense, and free to advance the interests of the community.

With the development of the [birth control] pill, “womanhood” would no longer mean the same thing as “motherhood”.