Katha Pollitt

thumb|In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state. Katha Pollitt (October 14, 1949) is an American poet, essayist, columnist, 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. Quotes Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (2014) In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state. A man’s home is his castle, but a woman’s body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it’s belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn’t her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision, not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court, chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot. Your DNA is not you. It is more like the basic instructions for you. DNA is to a person as a blueprint is to a house. Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism, and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed. Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it’s good for everyone if women have only the children they want and can raise well. Society benefits when women can commit to education and work and dreams without having at the back of their mind a concern that maybe it’s all provisional, because at any moment an accidental pregnancy could derail them for life. We don’t like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman’s life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for. [C]ontinuing a pregnancy is 12 to 14 times as potentially fatal as ending it. That means abortion is always potentially lifesaving for a pregnant woman. (And getting more so, because the maternal mortality rate is rising in the US even as it is falling around the world.) Actually, abortion is part of being a mother and of caring for children, because part of caring for children is knowing when it’s not a good idea to bring them into the world. What can that mean except that women’s sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will? The scalding rhetoric of the “pro-life” movement seems to propose the derivative claim that a fetus is from the moment of its conception a full moral person with rights and interests equal in importance to those of any other member of the moral community. But very few people—even those who belong to the most vehemently anti-abortion groups—actually believe that, whatever they say. It is as if a woman has a right to vote, but the polling place is across the state and casting a ballot costs two weeks’ pay, and as if she has a right to be a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, but her place of worship is a four-hour bus ride away, and before she can go to services she has to listen to a fundamentalist Christian sermon warning her that if she doesn’t accept Jesus as her personal savior she’s going straight to hell. We would never accept the kinds of restrictions on our other constitutional rights that we have allowed to hamper the right to end a pregnancy. I think there are a very few pro-lifers who would say that a zygote in a petri dish is the equivalent of you or me; it's just younger. If you can say that without laughing, maybe you are a true pro-lifer. But I think most people are able or willing to make distinctions that show they maybe don't quite believe that. Other quotes 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. Virginity Or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time (2006) We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women. Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (2004) Old, in America, is not a good thing to be. "Breaking feminism's waves" by Katha Pollitt, The Guardian, June 3, 2009 The real problem is stigma. Too many pro-choicers and people in what I call the “muddled middle” accept the anti-abortion framing: abortion is terrible, clinics are dangerous, providers are cold and money-grubbing, and women with unwanted pregnancies are careless and promiscuous and impulsive and selfish. Because the disapproval of abortion is so great and goes so deep, it’s hard for women to tell even family and friends that they have had one, and so the stereotype of women who’ve ended pregnancies as sluts and child-haters persists. "Reclaiming Abortion Rights", Dissent, Fall 2015 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. Those two facts cut right through so many assumptions: that women who end pregnancies are a different kind of person than women who keep them, that abortions are some weird, awful, desperate act and not a normal part of life in a female body. " Reclaiming Abortion Rights", Dissent, Fall 2015 The notion that female initiative is useless because men know what they want is particularly odd—most people don't even know what they want for dinner. "A Goose-Step Guide to Dating", Slate, November 1996 Misogyny runs deeper than religion. "Sexism and Religion: Can the Knot Be Untied?" The Center for Inquiry "Women in Secularism 2" conference, Saturday, May 18, 2013, in Washington, D.C. 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. "It Wasn't All Bad", The Nation, December 22, 2005 For me, religion is serious business—a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom. “Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture”, p.29, Modern Library, 2004 External links Katha Pollitt official blog Column archive at The Guardian Column archive at The Nation Katha Pollitt at The New Yorker CSPAN In Depth interview with Pollitt, July 6, 2008 Category:Women authors from the United States Category:20th-century poets from the United States Category:Essayists from the United States Category:Women journalists from the United States Category:American Book Award winners Category:Political authors from the United States Category:Poets from New York (state) Category:Journalists from New York City Category:Women activists from the United States Category:1949 births Category:Living people