Bodily Autonomy Quotes

“Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there's no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn't the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what's best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters.
But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn't be considered a 'privilege' to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It's a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what's best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“I don't often engage in debates over abortion rights, for the same reason I don't sit down to share a meal at any table where I am on the menu. My body is not a theory or a talking point, and neither is yours.”
― Hannah Matthews, You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula

“More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.”
― Helen Lewis

“To me, 'sexual freedom' means freedom from having to have sex.”
― Lily Tomlin

“If a woman is asking for birth control, it's because she needs it. The request itself is enough.”
― Aude Mermilliod, Le Chœur des femmes

“It's not your business what I do with my body, or what Alim does with his. You have no 'right' to me, we weren't together, we weren't even exclusive. You're not entitled to fuck me just because you were a decent human being and went along when I wasn't ready to be intimate with you, or be mad because I ended up fucking someone else. You don't get points for waiting for me. I didn't use you, I didn't lead you on. I went as far as I felt comfortable, and I stopped there.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

“You are a woman; this is your body. You are beholden to no one, Ke-Han or Volstovic.”
― Danielle Bennett, Dragon Soul

“My body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public and complex as any man's. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision – the first time I asserted, unequivocally: ‘I KNOW THE LIFE I WANT AND THIS IS NOT IT"; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder...

The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies...

For that reason, we simply MUST talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, and always an impossible decision. Well we're not and it's not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine...

My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“It is wholly justified to label vaccine passports as draconian, coercive, and one of the most dangerous government interventions in human history; an intervention that undermined voluntary consent to medical procedures and threatened the core principles of what it means to be an autonomous human being.”
― Aviel Oppenheim, Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain

“It was as though a memo had been forwarded to every government body demanding all nations sing the same tune. The official narrative was to hibernate, with the threat of fines and imprisonment, and await a vaccine; a vaccine that would be wielded as a stick to an obedient dog”
― Aviel Oppenheim, Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain

“It was as though a memo had been forwarded to every government body demanding all nations sing the same tune. The official narrative was to hibernate, with the threat of fines and imprisonment, and await a vaccine; a vaccine that would be wielded as a stick to an obedient dog.”
― Aviel Oppenheim, Ethics of Vaccine Passports: A Poor Bargain

“Every woman in the world is entitled to have bodily autonomy. One only has to look at history to see making abortions illegal or harder to obtain doesn’t work. All it does is endanger women’s lives. If women are unable to obtain safe abortions, they will use dodgy quacks, buy drugs off the internet or self-abort with a coathanger.”
― Vanessa de Largie

“The right to have an abortion has been popularly justified as a woman's right to control her own body. Such a right seems to be implied by a number of other rights, but only recently has it been stated in this way. So stated, it is somewhat confusing, for many of our laws, legal and moral, require one to control one's body—to restrain it, for instance, from killing the body of another person, except of course when ordered to do so by the government.”
― Wendell Berry

“Holly implored him. "Juan, I had a miscarriage. Obviously, God doesn't want me to carry our baby. But now, you, you can. This is a miracle! This is our second chance. God is good, all the time! Can I get an Amen?" She punctuated her words with a little celebratory dance. “I have to call Pastor Pete with the exciting miracle. Oh wait, I wonder if he is pregnant, too?” She laughed. “Can you imagine all the men at church, pregnant? We have to go next Sunday, I have got to see this.”
But Juan, determined to make his stance clear, was unyielding. "Holly! I get to have a choice here."
"Choice.” She snickered. “Welcome to life as a woman!” Holly spun around to see him. “Our entire existence is doing things we don't want to do, starting with our first period to having the great portal between our legs that brings humans into this world…and then you men dictating what we can and can’t do. Choice. Please.”
― Melanie Sovran Wolfe, Professor Hex vs. Texas Men: Where Women's Rights and Revenge Fantasy Meet

“As Juan listened to his wife's impassioned reasoning, a new and unsettling sensation overcame him. It was a feeling he had never experienced before – a profound loss of control over his own body. For the first time in his life, someone was dictating what he should do with his own physical being, and it left him profoundly uncomfortable.”
― Melanie Sovran Wolfe, Professor Hex vs. Texas Men: Where Women's Rights and Revenge Fantasy Meet

“I accepted the edict I was in control of my body and didn't have to adhere to societal beauty standards. I happened to like the feeling of shaved legs under fresh sheets.”
― Valentine Glass, Jarring Sex