2)       "Access to abortion will continue to be perceived by women as a necessity, if not a "right", so long as pregnancies occur in women's bodies." page x

3)       "Abortion is the fulcrum of a much broader ideological struggle in which the very meanings of the family, the state, motherhood, and young women's sexuality are contested." page xi

4)       "As a brief submitted by over four hundred professional historians in the Webster case argued, never before in history has the fetus been the primary focus of campaigns to restrict abortion." page xii

5)       "Antiabortion ideology presents an aura of religiosity more than an actual theology, separating the godly from the ungodly, the innocent from the damned. As such, it provides a neoconservative government with a banner for its claim to moral legitimacy and a new political language to legitimate its militarist policies." page xiii

6)       "Practically no other social policy could have won the Reagan and Bush administrations the semblance of "morality" at so little cost." page xiii

7)       "The technological capacity to transfer the fetus to some artificial life-support system has no bearing on the definition of rights and responsibilities that are inherently social and relational. But even within the accepted clinical definition, the focus on viability and late abortions is greatly exaggerated. Most authorities agree that extra-uterine techniques for sustaining fetuses of earlier than twenty-four weeks' gestation (600 grams) will not be achieved in the near future, if ever. On the other hand, fewer than 1 percent of all abortions in the U.S. occur past the twentieth week, and of these the majority are young teenagers whose delays are the avoidable result of fear, denial, and poverty." page xv

8)       ". . . the Alan Guttmacher Institute has published comprehensive studies showing that, while other developed countries have experienced similar trends and show similar levels of adolescent sexuality, the U.S. has "much lower rates of contraceptive use and much higher rates of childbearing, abortion, and pregnancy" - especially among teenagers but also among older women - than nearly any other developed country." page xvii

9)       "Birth control and abortion services, widely available without age or marital restrictions, have helped to make the young, white woman's sexuality visible, thereby undermining historical race and class stereotypes of "nice girls" and "bad girls." The clinic represents the existence of her sexual identity independent of marriage, of paternal authority, perhaps of men; and so in a sense it connotes (white) feminism. This is an important missing piece of the story and why the clinic becomes a target - of bombs and government regulation as well as prayers - and why, for ardent antiabortionists, the solution of "more effective contraception" so misses the point. The clinic symbolically threatens white patriarchal control over "their" young women's sexual "purity," and thus becomes a target of white patriarchal wrath." page xviii

10)       "For the one-third of abortion clinic patients who are women of color, both the experience of abortion and the meanings of antiabortion resentment have been different from their meanings for white women. One is struck by the absence, in crowds of "Operation Rescue" demonstrators, of people of color' except for an occasional black preacher and his followers, it is overwhelmingly a white Christian movement. One senses that, whatever misgivings black and Latin people may have about abortion and the white feminists whom they perceive as leading the "pro-choice" movement, they are aware of the underlying racism of the antiabortion campaign. This racism manifests itself in at least three ways: the sexual stigmatization of women of color, especially black women, in the white patriarchal ideas antiabortionists propagate; the racially discriminatory impact of legal barriers to abortion access; and the eugenic implications of a pronatalist ideology.

      If antiabortion zealots are reclaiming the white daughter's purity, the underside of their obsession is the black daughter's continued objectification as sexually "impute." . . . The denial of abortion funding and access is clearly racist in its consequences: Poor women are disproportionately women of color and are more likely to suffer deaths or injuries from illegal or botched abortions. They are also more likely to have to resolve unwanted pregnancy through sterilization, which is both permanent and government funded. But these policies are also racist in the implicit stereotypes upon which they rest." pages xviii - xix

11)       "Their historically particular and complex socialization about sexuality and childbearing may partly explain many black women's reluctance to get involved in activities supporting women's abortion rights. To the extent that such activities are associated with (white) feminist aspirations to "sexual freedom," they may conflict with black women's experience in several different ways. First, the sense of a collective past in which black women were systematically raped and sexually demeaned by white racists, having constantly to "prove" their "virtue," may make it difficult or painful for many black women to identify with a movement whose emphasis is "sexual liberation." Second, some black women, identifying with the models of black women who have defied traditionally sex codes and stereotypes, may feel this movement is irrelevant to their needs. . . .. For still others, however, the abortion issue may simply pale next to the daily onslaught of life-and-death crises caused by inadequate health care; child and infant mortality rates twice as high as those for whites; death rates from childbirth four times, and from hypertension seventeen times, those of white women; and the decimation of families by AIDS< drugs, and poverty." page xx

12)       "What, one wonders, do antiabortionists intend should become of the approximately 500,000 additional nonwhite babies who would be born if (hypothetically) all abortions were to stop? Whether their solution is adoption by white upscale baby consumers (making poor pregnant women into conscripted surrogate mothers), or increased poverty and suffering (since they oppose the level of social spending needed to help poop mothers raise their own babies), it is a patently racist and class-biased fantasy.       In the end, neither history no common sense supports the belief that women of any race or class can be stopped from having abortions through coercive legislation or judicial fiat. . . . The antiabortion movement represents people who not only feel their traditional way of life threatened but wish to impose it on everyone who is "different". "page xxi

13)       "What is lost in the language of liberal privacy is the concept of social rights, familiar in most European social democracies: that the society has a responsibility to ameliorate the conditions that make either abortion or childbearing a hard, painful choice for some women; and that the bearers of this right are not so much isolated individuals as they are members of social groups with distinct needs." page xxv

14)       "If abortion in American society is a highly divisive issue, its underpinnings are the much more deeply divisive matters of gender, race, and class." page xxv

15)       "Thus abortion came to represent in the 1970s much more than either a "terminated pregnancy" or a "murdered fetus." To feminists and antifeminists alike, it came to represent the image of the "emancipated woman" in her contemporary identity, focused on her education and work more than on marriage or childbearing; sexually active outside marriage and outside the disciplinary boundaries of the parental family; independently supporting herself and her children; and consciously espousing feminist ideas." page 241

16)       "Attack on sexual deviance and feminism historically have been a part of right-wing, or backlash, movements. Nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments helped fire crusades against abortion, obscenity, and birth control in late-nineteenth-century America. The early Ku Klux Klan and other right-wing groups in the 1920s attacked not only "cohabitation between whites and blacks" but "bootleggers, pimps, . . . wife-beaters, family-deserters, home-wreckers," as well as jazz music and short skirts. The Nazis marked homosexuals for extermination along with Jews, Bolsheviks, Slave, and gypsies. The witch-hunters of the McCarthy period persecuted homosexuals as well as communists, liberals, and other "unAmerican," lumping them into one "subversive" list. " page 243

17)       "If the embodiment of absolute evil for an earlier generation of the right was international communism, the left, and labor movements, in the recent period it is feminism and homosexuality." page 244

18)       "Religion provides an "apocalyptic framework which validates [moral] absolutism," but this framework is political in the most conventional sense: It has to do with how and by whom power is exercised in the economy, the state, the family, and the churches. In addition, religion supplies a language and symbolism through which the right lays claim to the righteousness and purity of its vision. " page 245

19)       "While New Right language and symbolism often take a mystical and irrational form, their ends are coherent and clear; the conflict between the values of the New Right and those they oppose, as they perceive better than many liberals, offers no compromise." page 246

20)       "The "profamily" movement is reacting to dramatic changes in family life that have occurred most sharply during the past fifteen years. When we add together the changes in marriage, fertility, women's labor force participation, and household composition discussed in Chapter 3, the result is that only around 10 percent of all American households consist of the "normative" model: husband-wife families with two or more children at home and the husband as the sole bread winner. Although marriage and remarriage rates are higher than ever before, the combination of postponed marriage and high divorce rates means that marriage becomes a phase of the life cycle rather than a lifetime proposition, with continually increasing numbers of women spending years of their adult lives heading households or alone. Delayed and declining fertility and the growing tendency to work during pregnancy and childbearing years have made active motherhood a shrinking part of most women's daily life and overall life cycle. While most women will raise one or two children in their lives, they will do so in a context of nearly continuous work outside the home and, for many, of decreasing economic dependence on men. Meanwhile, one out of five Americans lives as a single individual - not in a "family"; and a growing proportion of households (still a small minority) consists of young unmarried couples." pages 246 - 247

21)       "Historically, the concept of privacy for American conservatives has included not only "free enterprise" and "property rights" but also the rights of the white male property owner to control his wife and his wife's body, his children and their bodies, his slaves and their bodies. It is an ideology that is patriarchal and racist as well as capitalist." page 248

22)       "At first sight, a policy that restrict abortion access for poor women seems in direct contradiction to a decade-long policy of state-sponsored population control among the poor, as a means of diminishing welfare dependency. But neoconservative and New Right thinking about welfare cutbacks and abortion does not represent a pronatalist doctrine so much as a formula for restoring the traditional patriarchal family and the authority of men within it, among the poor as among the middle class." pages 250 -251

23)       "Social welfare cutbacks, including funding for abortion, are less a matter of increasing revenues or achieving a balanced budget than they are of imposing discipline, social control. . . . Piven and Cloward argue that the major purpose of social welfare cutbacks in the 1980s is to discipline workers by tightening the income-maintenance programs that make loss of employment less onerous, less threatening to all workers, not only the unemployed. Thus the cutbacks are ultimately directed at restoring the power of the capitalist class over the working class as a whole. . . .It seems undeniable that a major goal of the conservative state's effort to contract if not dismantle social welfare is to discipline and punish women who try to survive, and be sexual, outside the bounds of the traditional family." page 251

24)       "As Ellen Willis noticed some years ago, "the nitty-gritty issue in the abortion debate is not life but sex." " page 263

25)       "Sociologist Donald Granger's study of a national sample of "prolife" activists found no correlation between opposition to abortion and "a more generalized prolife stance," as reflected in opposition to capital punishment, war, and military spending. "Prolifers" tend to favor these forms of death. On the other hand, Granberg found the greatest correlation to exist between opposition to abortion and "a conservative approach to matters of traditional morality," that is, disapproval of premarital sex, birth control for teenagers, sex education, and divorce." page 263

26)       Quoting Sharon Thompson about the anit-sex bias of the "prolifers": "If we get a photo of a fetus masturbating, we might be able to short-circuit their whole movement." page 263

27)       "More than anything else, the subject that excites "prolifers" is premarital sex among teenagers." page 263

28)       "If a woman can control her pregnancies, there is no built-in sanction against her having sex when, how, and with whom she pleases - and this, for the "profamily" / "prolife" movement, is the heart of the matter: "free" sex." " page 264

29)       "Male homosexuality is even more dangerous than female in the "profamily" view because it signals a breakdown of "masculinity," or what one neoconservative calls the "male spirit" or "the male principle." " page 271

30)       "This is exactly what Schafly and her anti-ERA forces have been promoting since 1973: that it is women's "right" to be dependent, cared for, subordinate to men, and defined by marriage and motherhood." page 271

31)       "Religion can be said to have an impact on the overall incidence of premarital sex only when it is an encompassing and controlling force in the lives of the young and not merely an option." page 272

32)       "For the concerns of parents about their children getting pregnant, having abortions, abusing drugs, and being encouraged toward "sexual freedom" without any social context of sexual and reproductive responsibility are rational. Neither the left nor the women's movement has offered a model for a better, more socially responsible way for teenagers to live. The "prolife" movement's critique of a certain "hedonism," the cult of subjective experience and "doing whatever feels good'" with no sense of values outside the self, is in part a response to the moral failure of contemporary capitalist culture." page 274

33)       "Indeed, the most stinging contradiction embodied in the "prolife" movement may be that confronting its large numbers of female rank and file, most of them white, middle-class, and middle-aged. On the one hand, these are the very women for whom the loss of a protective conjugal family structure and motherhood as the core of woman's fulfillment is a menacing specter. On the other hand, what can it mean to be active as a woman in a political movement, or a church, that stands for women's passivity and subordination? How will the women of the New Right confront this dilemma?" page 274

34)       "We need more insight into the potential "crack in the high walls" around the evangelical churches and their women, Carol Virginia Pohli reminds feminists. She observes that in the process of engaging its congregants in politically controversial discourse, debate, and activism, New Right churches introduce a contradiction into their internal belief system and power structure; they thereby unwittingly expose their members to conflicting ideas and values and thus open up "potentially subversive" windows of change within their ranks. Only by ignoring the forces of radical change and creating a hermetically sealed world of separate institutions, teachings, schools, culture, and services can the New Right "protect" their women from feminism. Engaging them with the "enemy" has a dangerous side. This becomes even truer to the extent that evangelical women too are the victims of sexual abuse, job discrimination, and chauvinist treatment.

      Material and ideological contradictions may undo the "prolife" movement in the long run. The New Right's rejection of the now dominant ideology of the "working mother," their determination to bring women back into the home, represents a basic misunderstanding of current economic realities, including the long-range interests of the capitalist class as a whole, which continues to rely heavily on a (sex-segregated) female labor force. Corporations are unlikely to fill low-paying, part-time, unprotected, high-turnover jobs in the clerical and service sectors - "women's work" - with white male workers; yet these are still the growing areas of the economy. More important, the vast majority of families will continue to depend on at least two wage earners. While the "profamily" movement is reacting to social changes that have caused disruptions in people's lives, its "solutions" are relevant to only a tiny privileged minority." page 275

35)       "Finally, neither the practice of abortion and birth control nor the expression of sexual desire has ever been successfully stamped out by repressive religious or legal codes." page 276

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