I had been pregnant in the sixties, and at nineteen years old had had an illegal abortion that probably influenced the messy state of my reproductive organs. For the next nineteen years my priority was to finish my education and pursue my career. Now I couldn’t take my fate: You’ll never have a baby. That was the sentence handed to me. I began to beat my fists against a door that maybe I had locked on the other side.

[Remembering life events in 1964 or 1965] But as he was about to go to Oxford, I was appalled to find I was pregnant and even more appalled at his anti-abortion mother pressing us to marry. She suggested we would live in an Oxford flat, where I would bring up the baby while he studied: the end of my own future worried her not at all. We paid a visit to his newly married sister, who was living in Oxford’s Summertown, up the road from my great-aunts. I was pleased to see her, this lively, funny and magnetic character. But she was living, as far as I could see, the life their mother expected me to live, married and cooped up in an Oxford flat with a baby. Though she was herself a student, wifedom and life with a baby looked to me like a brutal curtailment of studenthood, locked in at home. There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy. I shuddered at the prospect of this motherly existence, threatening an end to my life before it had even begun.
Afterwards, as we both contemplated this scene, looking at his sister and at the vision of our future stretching out ahead of us, he broke off with me. [Toynbee had a then illegal abortion.]

[on his ex-wife's abortion] Has anyone had an abortion? You're all rapt with attention now, all of a sudden, so I assume you all have. It's a fucking horrible thing to go through. And not horrible in that "Oh, it's a living thing, what are we doing?" Fuck the living thing. A genital wart is a living thing. If it's gonna irritate you for life, burn it off, right? Bladder cancer is alive and growing like a baby in you. If you try to remove that, I'll protest you and say "stop playing god." … Before you actually go and get all quiet and pissy like I'm some asshole about this, keep in mind I'm just telling you the parts that I think are funny. You don't know the reason we had... The reason we had an abortion was... It wasn't because... It wasn't frivolous. We didn't have an abortion because we weren't ready to take care of a child, we were irresponsible, or because we're not financially capable of taking... The reason we had it is 'cause I really wanted to see what it felt like to kill a baby.

Many of us were the unplanned children of talented, creative women whose lives had been changed by unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. We witnessed their bitterness, their rage, their disappointment with their lot in life and we were clear that there could be no genuine sexual liberation for women and men without better, safer contraceptives, without the right to a safe, legal abortion.

When I was nine years old, I stumbled upon a book that contained photos of preborn children who had been killed in the 1st trimester by suction abortion. Even at that age, I could plainly see that abortion involves killing a child and does tremendous violence to its mother. As I grew older, I began to research abortion's impact on our nation, and its effects on the mother -- injuries, infertility, life-long depression and guilt, and even the likelihood for that guilt to manifest itself in physical or emotional abuse of later children. I also studied the lives of those who fought human rights abuses, from slavery to the Nazi extermination of the Jews to the civil rights movement, and activists and advocates like Martin Luther King, Jr., St Teresa of Calcutta, William Wilberforce, and Sophie Scholl.

…If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away…And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.

Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. A life in which one can be forced into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and compelling a woman to bear a rapist's child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant... because efforts at birth control accidentally failed?

Of course I don’t expect you to have any feelings for me, since I abandoned you when you were a baby. Nor do I feel any great maternal love for you. I know that very few women would speak this way — would permit themselves to — but when you were born, it was too late for an abortion and adoption was impossible in your father’s family. It’s not as if I ever had some great mission in life. I wasn’t an actress or a scientist or a writer or even a philanthropist. I had no goal, no destiny. But I knew that, restless as I was, I could bring you nothing but misery.

the history of a daughter is a drama in three acts. One: from age three to nineteen you will kill any man who touches her. Two: from age twenty to twenty-five you hope that one at least of the young men nosing around will prove satisfactory. Three: from age twenty-six on you pray that any man at all, even a train robber, will take her off your hands. Marjorie is twenty-three and my husband no longer dreams of a perfect husband. Just an acceptable one.

I knew I was going to get a good education. I was going to be a lawyer. But I knew that I was on my own. My family disowned me. They thought I gave them a bad name because I got pregnant. It was a big deal back then

We also said that if, unfortunately, they become pregnant, they should avoid abortion at all costs, because today they are allowed to continue their studies after giving birth. They were also told about the risks they run with abortion. They were advised to abstain. For older girls who cannot abstain, they were told to have protected sex and thus avoid pregnancy, STDs and HIV/AIDS...

My mother was pregnant with me while she was in prison. She was her own attorney, never been to law school. She was facing 300 and something odd years. One black woman, pregnant, beat the case. That just goes to show you the strength of a black woman and the strength of the oppressed.

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

During our time, as a little girl, you were not even allowed to have any ambition. You were to grow up to the age of 17, get married, have children, grow old and died. That was the norm. That was the way it was for female children at that time in the environment I grew up.