Quotes by Katha Pollitt

“ knowing that its there for them if they really need it.”

“Ten years of misogynistic lad culture later and women victims are still on trial.”

“Shes very brave the way she tackles this in the book. Shes been given a lot of flak from the right, saying, Whod want you? But she does deal well with the imperfect fit between men and women. If she was a man, shed have a ton of people throwing themselves at her.”

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict womens ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? Its as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a womans life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. Its not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.

We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—whyd they have kids if they couldnt support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies.

There had always been a little wiggle room in state abortion laws, because doctors were still permitted to perform them for “therapeutic” reasons—to save a woman’s life, for example.7 But what did that mean, exactly? An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that “a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain.

I think the meaning of abortion is what the woman says it is: For a woman who wants a child but cant have this one, it can be sad; for a woman who doesnt want a baby, it can feel like a huge relief, like having your whole life given back to you.

If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from fetal-tissue research. This is, after all, a practice thats been legal since the 1930s.

Ariel may look a lot like Barbie, and her adventure may be limited to romance and over with the wedding bells, but unlike, say, Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, shes active, brave and determined, the heroine of her own life. She even rescues the prince. And that makes her a rare fish, indeed, in the world of preschool culture.

Sure, men like a challenge - but so do women. And nobody likes to be challenged all the time. I know plenty of long-standing happy couples who slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding.