7 Prominent Abortionists Admit Life Begins at Conception

In in article in one of its printed publications, NARAL asserts that “Personhood at conception is a religious belief, not a provable biological fact.”¹

However, the science concerning human life beginning at conception and fertilization is so undeniable that even abortion supporters must admit that abortion is the killing of a human life.

7 Leading abortion supporters who admit that life begins at conception

Below are quotes from 7 prominent pro-abortion figures who recognize that human life begins at conception.

1. Faye Wattleton, longest reigning president of Planned Parenthood

In an interview with Ms. magazine in 1997, Wattleton admits the following:

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

Faye Wattleton, “Speaking Frankly,” Ms., May/June 1997, Volume VII, Number 6, 67.

2. Ann Furedi, chief executive of the largest independent abortion business in the UK

In a 2008 debate, Furedi said the following:

We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life.

Ann Furedi, “Abortion: A Civilised Debate,” Battle of Ideas, (London, England, November 1, 2008)

3. Naomi Wolf, prominent feminist author and abortion supporter

Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life… we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.

Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic, October 16, 1995, 26.

4. David Boonin

In his book, A Defense of Abortion, Boonin writes the following:

In the top drawer of my desk, I keep [a picture of my son]. This picture was taken on September 7, 1993, 24 weeks before he was born. The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clear enough a small head tilted back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointing back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows [my son] at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point.

David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xiv.

5. Peter Singer, contemporary philosopher and public abortion advocate

In his book, Practical Ethics, Singer writes the following:

It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2008), 85-86.

6. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of one of the most influential abortion advocacy groups in the world (NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League), one time medical director for the largest abortion clinic in America

There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy…

Bernard Nathanson, M.D., “Deeper into Abortion,” New England Journal of Medicine, November 28, 1974, Vol. 291, No. 22: 1189-1190.

There is simply no doubt that even the early embryo is a human being. All its genetic coding and all its features are indisputably human. As to being, there is no doubt that it exists, is alive, is self-directed, and is not the the same being as the mother—and is therefore a unified whole.

Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., The Hand of God (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996), 131.

7. Margaret Sanger, birth control pioneer who founded Planned Parenthood

Sanger publicly condemned abortion, saying that abortion is “dangerous and vicious.”²

She justified contraception as being different from abortion by saying, “no new life begins unless there is conception.”³ Sanger recognized that if life begins at conception, then abortion is essentially “the killing of babies.”⁴

More Resources

• 25 Scientific Sources: Life Begins at Conception
• End Abortion Now

1. Polly Rothstein and Marian Williams, “Choice” (New York: Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion, 1983), printed and distributed by the NARAL Foundation, Washington, DC. [↩]
2. Margaret Sanger, Esther Katz, ed, “The Pope’s Position on Birth Control,” January 27, 1932. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Volume 2. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 150. [↩]
3. Ibid., 148. [↩]
4. Margaret Sanger, Esther Katz, ed, “Hotel Brevoort Speech,” January 17, 1916. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Volume 1. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 178. [↩]