John Irving Quotes

No government should dictate whether or when we should have children….Reproductive freedom is a basic human right.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

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

Reproductive choice is a fundamental human right and we can never take it for granted. On this issue, you're either with us or against us.

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.

I think women have the right to consult their own wishes, needs, and capacities and produce only loved, wanted children they can care for - or even no children at all. I think we would all be better off as a society if we respected women's ability to make these decisions for themselves and concentrated on caring well for the born.

It's a fundamental human right to decide to have children or not to have children.

If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect.

I'm the only pro-life woman in the Senate. I take this issue very seriously. I'm the mother of two children.

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.

Reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right. We therefore oppose government interference in the reproductive decisions of Americans.

If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure that abortion remains safe and legal.

What a priceless ideal for mothers to follow! To continue bearing children misshapen, deformed, hideous to the eyes, in the hope that Heaven may be filled! It’s a monstrous doctrine, abhorrent of every civilized instinct in us.

We never use the phrase population control. It has an implication of coercion.

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.

Children when irregularly produced are a cause of great inconvenience.

I think women have to be able to choose... sort of, the right of choice. They are the ones that have to make the decision because they're the ones that are going to decide to bring up that child or not.

Personally, I would counsel any woman who asked, in my family, to do her best to carry the child full term, and I'd try to help. But I do believe the government should not prohibit a woman from making that decision.

I have chosen not to have children.

I didn't even choose to be born! It was my parents' decision to have a child.

The goal was 'every child a wanted child'; it should also have been 'every abortion a wanted abortion', but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet.

The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of all human beings.

It is clear that Americans have a right to birth control.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.