Katha Pollitt Quotes
… the right to an abortion is society’s down payment on all the rights we [women] are yet due.
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.
McCain had lost the 2008 Presidential Race and was not going to run again. At this time he was trying to counterbalance the views of some of his party’s new presidential nomination candidates—all men—who wanted to reverse a woman’s Constitutional right to abortion and favored policies that would diminish women’s access to affordable birth control. Some people observed that his logic applied equally well to abortion, but he was at that time not in favor of abortion on demand but did support the right of a woman to choose an abortion in cases of rape, incest or medical conditions where childbirth would endanger the life of the mother.
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.
Note, that like other feminist leaders of the time, she opposed abortion. However, between the economic pressures and the illegality of birth control devices and information provision, abortion was a critical decision that had to be faced by many women. Later, feminist leadership had to come to grips with the issue of who makes the decision in these areas, and placed the right of the woman to make these decisions, as opposed to husbands, fathers and government, as the highest priority. Then, when the drivers for abortion could not be eliminated, it was women who were criminalized. Feminists then fought for the right of abortion and the right of the woman to make decisions, but feminine leadership has never—in America—been advocates of abortion as opposed to the right of abortion, a subtlety that often is lost.
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.
