Thursday Thirteen

1. No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body. ~ Margaret Sanger

2. Seventy-seven percent of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant. ~ Planned Parenthood advertisement

3. The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

4. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. ~ Florynce Kennedy

5. It’s real easy to say you’re 100% against abortion when you’ll never have to make that decision. ~ Anonymous

6. Decades ago, women suffered through horrifying back-alley abortions. Or, they used dangerous methods when they had no other recourse. So when the Republican Party launched an all-out assault on women’s health, pushing bills to limit access to vital services, we had to ask: Why is the GOP trying to send women back . . . to the back alley? ~ Lisa Edelstein

7. Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion. ~ Ayelet Waldman

8. Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. ~ Peter Kreeft

9. You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion. ~ Hillary Clinton

10. If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot. ~ Christiane Northrup

11. My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. ~ Camille Paglia

12. The issue is not abortion. The issue is whether women can make up their own mind instead of some right-wing pastor, some right-wing politician telling them what to do. ~ Howard Dean

13. What is this ban on abortion—it is a survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, burning, branding, mutilation, stoning, of all the grip of ownership and superstition come down on woman, thousands of years ago. ~ Stella Brown

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 721st time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.