Top 42 Katha Pollitt Quotes
#1. If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?
Katha Pollitt
#2. We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.
Katha Pollitt
#3. For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.
Katha Pollitt
#4. We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child - indeed, sometimes more moral.
Katha Pollitt
#5. 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 women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.
Katha Pollitt
#7. Unlike the vast majority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not assume that her body ceased to be her own because she was pregnant.
Katha Pollitt
#8. 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
#9. The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman's desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.
Katha Pollitt
#10. Funny how ready people are to believe that counseling, which even when voluntary takes years to modify garden-variety neuroses, can work wonders in months with resistant patients who hate each other.
Katha Pollitt
#11. 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?
Katha Pollitt
#12. 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
#13. While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.
Katha Pollitt
#14. Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times
Katha Pollitt
#15. One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.
Katha Pollitt
#16. 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
#17. For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.
Katha Pollitt
#19. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the US Preventative Services Task Force, there is no medical reason for a gynecological exam to get a prescription for the Pill, with an annual repeat in order to renew it.13
Katha Pollitt
#20. 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
#21. Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the wiser.
Katha Pollitt
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. the late 1940s, hospitals in many states set up abortion committees to which a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy could appeal.9 It was a humiliating process, which could involve multiple physical examinations and interrogations by unsympathetic doctors.
Katha Pollitt
#25. don't think women have the right to a self. They are supposed to live for others. Qualities that are seen as normal and desirable in men - ambition, confidence, outspokenness - are perceived as selfish and aggressive in women, especially when they have children.
Katha Pollitt
#26. 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.
Katha Pollitt
#27. 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
#28. 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. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.
Katha Pollitt
#29. And that is close to saying that a woman can have no needs, desires, purpose, or calling so compelling and so important that she should not set it aside in an instant, because of a stray sperm.
Katha Pollitt
#30. 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
#31. They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.
Katha Pollitt
#32. In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.
Katha Pollitt
#33. If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?
Katha Pollitt
#34. My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.
Katha Pollitt
#35. For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes.
Katha Pollitt
#36. Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life - a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world?
Katha Pollitt
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. though he's wrong about how these methods work. It's religion - facts don't matter, especially when the facts involve women's liberty.
Katha Pollitt
#40. 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
#41. Contrary to the popular stereotype of abortion-seeking women as promiscuous teenagers or child-hating professionals, around 6 in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers.
Katha Pollitt
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