Voices

“Nobody else has the right to take life; not the mother, not the father.”

--Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate

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“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

--Florynce Kennedy, feminist attorney

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“I think of it (a fetus) as a piece of meat on my body. I can never get punished for cutting off a finger.”

--A Chinese woman, 25, who has had four abortions

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“Islam lays a great deal of stress on the sanctity of life. The Holy Book tells us: ‘Kill not your children on a plea of want. We provide sustenance for them and for you.’ Islam, therefore, except in exceptional circumstances, rejects abortion as a means of population control.”

--Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto

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“In the end, it’s only a woman who can decide to have a baby or not. No one can force a woman to have a child because if you don’t want it, you can’t be a good mother.”

--Ursula Cordier, 30, who lives outside Cologne, Germany, with her husband and children, 2 and 4.

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“Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions, and unwanted children living in misery.”

--Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland

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“The people I know who had abortions generally don’t take it so seriously and (don’t) agonize over it a lot. The feeling is more that something unexpected happened, and this is a way to return things to how they were.”

--Misao Kinoshita, a 32-year-old Japanese bank employee

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“I am against the taking of life in an abortion. But I am even more against the sort of taking of life that occurs when people in the United States murder doctors at abortion clinics.”

--Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, Israel parliamentarian and member of the ultra-Orthodox Degel Hatorah party