Adrienne Rich

In teaching women, we have two choices:

Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels is correct in his famous statement that in the patriarchal family the husband is the bourgeois and the wife and children the proletariat. But each is something more to each, something which both cements and can outlast economic bondage.

The labor of childbirth has been a form of forced labor.

an we distinguish physical pain from alienation and fear? Is there creative pain and destructive pain? And who or what determines the causes and nature and duration of our suffering? In different cultures there are different answers; but women live, bear children, and suffer in all cultures.

A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth which does not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children, the priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with good nutrition, schooling, health care can, while perceiving itself as progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its highest priority on the technology of war.

Patriarchy has told the woman in labor that her suffering was purposive—was the purpose of her existence; that the new life she was bringing forth (especially if male) was of value and that her own value depended on bringing it forth.

As Shapiro has put it, “The state makes it easier for a mother on welfare to obtain a sterilization than to keep warm in winter, find child care, or provide nourishing meals for her children

Abortion can be an act of economic desperation under an economic exploitation which, though less total and overtly violent than slavery, offers women minimal options both in the workplace and the home.

Throughout this book I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.