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Abortion

intentional ending of a pregnancy

Abortion is the ending of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus before it can survive outside the uterus.

Partus antequam edatur, mulieris portio vel viscerum est.
The child is a part of the woman, or of her entrails, before it is born.
—Ulpian
One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives.
—Ayn Rand

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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  • Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
  • All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy... Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed [abortion]. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!
    • Anonymous essay signed "A" in The Revolution, August 8, 1869. Wrongly attributed to Susan B. Anthony.
  • Much as I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder, earnestly as I desire its suppression, I cannot believe ... that such a law [against abortion] would have the desired effect. It seems to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains. We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it...It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from the dreadful deed.
    • Anonymous essay signed "A" in The Revolution, August 8, 1869. Wrongly attributed to Susan B. Anthony.
  • I guess I never realized I would find [performing abortions] as unpleasant as I do. I really don't enjoy it at all. It's not a rewarding thing to do ... [patients] look at you as an evil person who is deliberately putting them through a painful procedure ... it's their whole attitude that bothers me. I feel like a simple thank you is in order, instead of 'Why are you doing this to me?'
  • I have the utmost respect for life; I appreciate that life starts early in the womb, but I also believe that I am ending it for good reasons.
    • Anonymous Boston abortion doctor, "Confessions of an Abortion Doctor," Cheryl Alkon, Boston Magazine, December 2004.
  • I don't approve, but it doesn't matter if I don't approve. I'm doing my job, I'm doing what I am trained to do.
    • Anonymous abortion doctor, The Abortionist Mary Ellen Mark, GQ Magazine, Feb 1994.
  • Murder, red-handed murder, is so popular in Chicago today that you cannot go on the principal streets without seeing the signs hanging out by the dozens of scoundrels in the shape of men who stand ready to commit the murder of an unborn innocent for $5 and upward.
    • Anonymous speaker, from the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the American Association of Spiritualists, 1873 [1].
  • She will rue the day she forces nature.
    • Susan B. Anthony, women's suffrage movement leader, writing in her diary on March 7, 1876, when her sister-in-law was bedridden after an abortion that did not go well. [2][3]
  • [T]he line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.

B

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  • Men tend to take abortion lightly; they regard it as one of the numerous hazards imposed on women by malignant nature, but fail to realise fully the values involved. The woman who has recourse to abortion is disowning feminine values, her values, and at the same time is in most radical fashion running counter to the ethics established by men. Her whole moral universe is being disrupted....[H]ow could they fail to feel an inner mistrust of the presumptuous principles that men publicly proclaim and secretly disregard? They learn to believe no longer in what men say when they exalt woman or when they exalt man; the one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there.
    • Simone de Beauvoir, feminist leader and advocate of legalized abortion, in The Second Sex, 1952.
  • Squats on a toad-stool under a tree
      A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom,
    Crying with frog voice, “What shall I be?
    Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me
      Scarcely alive in her wicked womb.”
  • Abortion, it can be said, is contraception practised late. So the ethical rules that support contraception also support the abortion of a non-viable fetus, that is one not yet capable of living indefinitely outside the mother's body. Abortion is always sad, and depressing for the aborting woman. It negates her nature, and for that we should have pity. Yet it is her choice.
  • When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.
    • Mattie Brinkerhoff, women's suffrage movement leader, in The Revolution (September 2, 1869).[4].

C

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  • Abortion does not seem the kind of moral issue which is just 'solved' once and for all; it can only be coped with.
    • Daniel Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1972)
  • Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't wanna fuck in the first place? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked. Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach military age. Then they think you're just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life... pro-life... These people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women. They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state.
  • Here's another question I have. How come when it's us, it's an abortion, and when it's a chicken, it's an omelet? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden? When did this happen; that we passed chickens in goodness? Name six ways we're better than chickens... See, nobody can do it! You know why? 'Cause chickens are decent people. You don't see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No. You don't see a chicken strapping some guy to a chair and hooking up his nuts to a car battery, do you? When's the last chicken you heard about came home from work and beat the shit out of his hen, huh? Doesn't happen... 'cause chickens are decent people.
  • Catholics and other Christians are against abortions and they're against homosexuals. Well who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone for Christ's sake! Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion! And the Catholics and the Christians are just tossing them aside... You'd think they'd make natural allies.
  • When we look to the unborn child, the real issue is not when life begins, but when love begins.
    • Robert Casey, as quoted or paraphrased by George W. Bush, "Remarks on Signing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act" (November 5, 2003), Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, vol. 39, no. 45 (November 10, 2003), pp. 1540–1
  • If you haven't seen what abortion does, then you will never understand what abortion actually is.
    • Clenard Howard Childress, Jr., Life Education And Resource Network.
  • You're not going to get the answers from holy texts. You're not going to the answers from biologists. These are matters of human concern. There are conflicting values and taken in isolation each of these values is quite legitimate. Choice is legitimate, preserving life is legitimate.
    • Noam Chomsky, linguist and political writer, from interview in documentary film Lake of Fire [5].

D

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  • Everybody is right when it comes to the issue of abortion.
    • Alan Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, from interview in documentary film Lake of Fire [6].

E

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  • [Abortion opponents] love little babies, as long as they're in somebody else's uterus.
    • Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, Redbook Magazine (August, 1994).

F

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  • Women have the right to life, to their life and the lives of their children. Let’s not forget this. Abortion is murder. Science says that within a month from conception all the organs are already there. One kills a human being. Doctors who engage in this are—pardon the expression—hit men. This cannot be disputed. One kills a human life. And women have the right to protect life.

G

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  • The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement.
    • Germaine Greer, feminist author and advocate of legal abortion, essay Abortion, The Sunday Times, 21 May 1972.
  • It is typical of the contradictions that break women's hearts that when they avail themselves of their fragile right to abortion they often, even usually, went with grief and humiliation to carry out a painful duty that was presented to them as a privilege. Abortion is the latest in a long line of non-choices that begin at the very beginning with the time and the place and the manner of lovemaking.
  • The goal was ‘every child a wanted child’; it should also have been ‘every abortion a wanted abortion’, but the two sides of the phony debate were never to meet.

H

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  • Odd pawk this that's
    laid her up for good:
    copper helix like a
    fiddlehead's lovelock
    in her womb. The aborted
    little tiny, future
    bantling's all in driblets;
    limb from limb and
    bit by bit.
    Semi, hemi, aliquot.
    • Maggie Hannan, "Dr Roget's Bedside Manner", pt. 1, anthologized in The new poetry (1993), p. 311
  • If a fertilized egg is fully human, then all terminations of pregnancy at any stage and for any reason are to be regarded as murder. This offends against the natural or instinctive feeling in favor of the pregnant woman and the occupant of her womb, because it blurs the distinction between an embryonic group of cells and a human with a central nervous system. The distinction between abortions in the first and third trimesters, a distinction which speaks both to our ability to avoid casuistry and to our inborn wish to have a say in our own fates, is therefore null and void in Catholic teaching.

I

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J

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  • There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life ... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.
    • Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, (January, 1977).
  • The polls find that most of us think we have made up our minds about abortion. Another way of reading the polls is that the silent minority wishes the noisy majority would shut up and leave their consciences alone. But they don't shut up. They don't let go. And that is a good thing. Abortion is an issue of death and of life. And to find your true feelings about it means you have to confront your own morality and mortality. That is not an easy or comforting thing to do. That is why throughout history the majority's first, most persistent answer to moral challenge has been, 'Shut up.' That is why the pages of history are punctuated with martyrs.
    Finally, however, a time comes to listen. But, for abortion that time won't come until those most concerned - on both sides - stop to listen to what the other has to say. It they would listen they would realize that each side - pro-abortion and anti-abortion is pro-life.
    The anti-abortion forces are so obsessed with the question of birth that they ignore another question: What happens after the baby gets here? The fight long and desperately to save the fetus but are not nearly so worried about the challenge to save the children.
    The pro-abortion forces say that the social conditions awaiting so many of the unborn are not good enough to live in. It is a legitimate concern, but in finding an answer in abortion they are overstepping their rights. In denying life because social conditions, they are forcing their cynicism on others.
    • Jesse Jackson, Must Attack Conditions Leading to Abortion, January 30, 1978, The Evening News, Editorial Page, John J. Prizzia Jr., publisher, Newburgh, N.Y., vol. 17, no. 349, p. 6A. [7]
  • The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.
  • It is not possible to speak of the right to choose when a clear moral evil is involved, when what is at stake is the commandment, Do not kill!

K

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  • Who cares if it's legal? I don't care if it's legal. Slavery was legal once too, and not just in America, but just about every other country in the world. The powerful have always legalized their subjugation of the less powerful.
  • At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. ... [P]eople have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. ... We conclude the line should be drawn at viability, so that, before that time, the woman has a right to choose to terminate her pregnancy. ...[T]here is no line other than viability which is more workable. To be sure, as we have said, there may be some medical developments that affect the precise point of viability, but this is an imprecision within tolerable limits. ... A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices.
  • The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.
  • Babies are not like bad teeth to be jerked out just because they cause suffering. An unborn baby is a baby nevertheless.

L

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  • As long as the Catholic Church, or any faith, continues to block legislation allowing individual conscience and free choice in abortion, the core of our democratic system is crippled. The right to abortion is the foundation of Society's long struggle to guarantee that every child comes into this world wanted, loved, and cared for. The right to abortion, along with all birth-control measures, must establish the Century of the Wanted Child.
    • Lawrence Lader, Abortion (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), p. 165.
  • We lived our dreams and challenged fate
    In tears she told me she was late
    Then Sally let his pigeons out to fly
    She left one night with just a nod
    Was lost in some back alley job
    I close my eyes and Sally's pigeons fly.
  • The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces: what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.
    • Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1997).

M

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  • The cruel irony is that abortion has been presented as something that would set a woman free. This brings to mind the gypsy in Verdi's opera Il Trovatore. Outraged by the count's cruel injustice, she stole his infant son and, in a crazed act of vengeance, flung him into the fire. Or so she thought. For, in turning around, she discovered the count's son lay safe on the ground behind her; it was her own son she had thrown into the flames. Abortion can present itself as glittering liberty, a defiant way to cast off the shackles of injustice. That illusion lasts only until you realize who it was that you threw into the flames.
  • When we question whether someone is a person, it is because we want to kill him. We do this with our enemies in wartime, or with anyone we would like to enslave or exploit. Before we can feel comfortable treating others this way, we have to expel them from the human community.

N

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O

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  • Quae prima instituit teneros convellere fetus,
      Militia fuerat digna perire sua.
    • She who first plucked forth the tender life deserved to die in the warfare she began.
      • Ovid, Amores, II, xiv, 1–6 (tr. Grant Showerman)
  • How does a doctor's ability to stop an abortion supersede a woman's right to full knowledge of her medical condition? Doctors in the antiabortion movement continue to declare themselves more virtuous than me. But I ask which one of us tells only the truth to our patients, and which of us is willing to lie to get what we want. I will not lie to my patients, no matter how difficult it may be to deliver the news. I trust them to ask good questions and make educated decisions, with my help if they ask for it. I had hoped that the rest of the medical community shared my beliefs about being honest with patients. I am greatly saddened to learn otherwise.

P

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Q

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R

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  • One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives.
    • Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975.
  • We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.
    • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.
  • If you don't know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn."
    • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.
  • The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being.
    • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.
  • Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value.
    • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.
  • As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the 'quality of life' ethic. I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future.
    • Ronald Reagan, "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation", Human Life Review, Spring 1984.
  • I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.
    • Ronald Reagan, presidential campaign debate, 21 September, 1980. Quoted in The New York Times, September 22, 1980.
  • Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable... In a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no 'abortion issue'... Abortion is violence... It is the offspring, and will continue to be the accuser of a more pervasive and prevalent violence, the violence of rapism.
    • Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and author and advocate of legal abortion, in Of Woman Born, 1976.
  • Abortion, it's beautiful, it's beautiful abortion is legal. I love going to an abortion rally to pick up women, 'cause you know they are fucking... When a woman gets pregnant, it's a choice between the woman and her girlfriends. One girlfriend goes, 'Child, you should have that baby — that man got some good hair.' And the other girlfriend says, 'Child, why we even talking about this — ain't we supposed to go to Cancun next week? Get rid of that baby!' [That] is how life is decided in America.
    • Chris Rock, comedian, in his stand-up comedy routine, February 2005 [9].
  • [A] physician of wealth and high standing had seduced a girl and then induced her to commit abortion—I rather lost my temper, and wrote to the individuals who had asked for the pardon, saying that I extremely regretted that it was not in my power to increase the sentence.
  • Still I think there's too much fuss about abortion. This is done by men. Men who don't give a fuck about their own kids, those who already have arms and legs. And go to grade one. They should be bought a backpack or trainers and taught drawing. [...] They've got neither dough nor time for their own kids, but about yours and mine whose arms still haven’t grown... Okay. Had I given them a chance, they would've had arms and legs. You get it. Where was I? Those masters don't even know they have kids, but they know everything about abortions. They write science papers, give lectures, hand flyers, present diapositives, show slowmotion small bodies being crunched. Jerks have eyes full of love for late and future abortions. They want to unite abortions of the world. Raise them to their feet! In your dreams!

S

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  • When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
    • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's suffrage movement leader, in a letter to Julia Ward Howe recorded in Howe's diary at Harvard University Library (October 16, 1873). See also: Dannenfelser, Marjorie (4 November 2015). "The Suffragettes Would Not Agree With Feminists Today on Abortion". Time. Archived from the original on 6 November 2015. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  • "About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic, the mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?"
    "I would have terminated the pregnancy."
    "Then you would have murdered Beethoven."
    • Rhetorical dialogue attributed to Norman St John-Stevas (who apparently got the idea from Maurice Baring) in Peter and Jean Medawar, The Life Science (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 64. The Medawars give the following counter-argument:
      The reasoning involved in this odious little argument is breathtakingly fallacious, for unless it is being suggested that there is some causal connection between having a tubercular mother and a syphylitic father and giving birth to a musical genius the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste abstention from intercourse or even by a woman's having a menstrual period; for by either means the world may be deprived of whatever genetic make-up conduces to the development of a musical genius.

T

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  • ...the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself... because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
    • Mother Teresa, in her Nobel Lecture given upon receiving the Peace Prize (December 11, 1979).
  • It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.

U

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  • Partus antequam edatur, mulieris portio vel viscerum est.
    • The child is a part of the woman, or of her entrails, before it is born.

V

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  • Even if you are pro-choice, no one likes to see a dead fetus.
    • Vilma Valdez, Education Director Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami, The Miami Herald (October 24, 1992).

W

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  • In some cases abortion is justified.
    • Henry Wade, Dallas County, Texas, district attorney, commenting in 1997 about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court abortion case Roe v. Wade, in which he was the defendant.
  • George W. Bush, go to hell! And while you're at it, we want you to take Ashcroft with you. And don't forget Rumsfeld. And please carry along Condi Rice... I have to march because my mother could not have an abortion.
    • Maxine Waters, member of US Congress, at the televised pro-choice March For Women's Lives, (April 25, 2004).
  • Women... sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection... either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast if off when born. Nature in every thing demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.

X

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Y

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Z

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  • It's a nasty, dirty, yucky thing and I always come home angry... I've become very good at it. I've become one hell of an abortionist. But it's not something I tell my kids about... Have you ever seen one? ... I don't care what anyone say, it is not a tonsillectomy, not just any old medical procedure. It's terminating a potential human life.
    • David Zbaraz, abortion doctor, "Abortionist; Doctor Joins Suit for Right to Do Operation He Hates", Washington Post, (March 3, 1980).

In fiction

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  • Michael Corleone: I know you blame me for losing the baby. Yes, I know what that meant to you. I'll make it up to you, Kay. I swear I'll make it up to you. I'm gonna change. I'll change. I've learned that I have the strength to change. And you'll forget about this miscarriage. And we'll have another child. And we'll go on, you and I. We'll go on.
Kay Adams-Corleone: Oh, Michael. Michael, you are blind. It wasn't a miscarriage. It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael! Just like our marriage is an abortion, something that's unholy and evil. I didn't want your son, Michael! I wouldn't bring another one of you sons into this world! It was an abortion, Michael! It was a son, Michael! A son! And I had it killed because this must all end!

See also

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Wikipedia
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