Since 'Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights' came out, I've done a fair amount of public speaking, and the two statistics that always make the audience sit up are that nearly one in three women will have had at least one abortion by menopause and 61 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers.

Katha Pollitt

Categorized in : Will Done Women Abortion

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

Katha Pollitt

god country children

Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf.

Katha Pollitt

powerful struggle men

A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.

Katha Pollitt

feminist justice men

Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in.

Katha Pollitt

misogyny tradition practice

Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters.

Katha Pollitt

buddhism character sex

When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended. ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak.

Katha Pollitt

law ideas needs

One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.

Katha Pollitt

feminism important ideas

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat.

Katha Pollitt

motherhood sex moving

Misogyny runs deeper than religion.

Katha Pollitt

misogyny deeper running

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's 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.

Katha Pollitt

motherhood baby thinking

Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to.

Katha Pollitt

two past years

When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.

Katha Pollitt

holiday wish baby

Every inch of progress is won in struggle.

Katha Pollitt

inches progress struggle

I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers.

Katha Pollitt

prayer believe school

We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.

Katha Pollitt

epidemics feminist trying

... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.

Katha Pollitt

process people thinking

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

Katha Pollitt

teaching christian country

Old, in America, is not a good thing to be.

Katha Pollitt

good-things america

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

Katha Pollitt

deception lying thinking

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

Katha Pollitt

exercise teacher thinking