Florynce Kennedy? Gloria Steinem? Elderly Irish Taxicab Driver? Germaine Greer? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: An incendiary quotation on the topic of abortion has an uncertain authorship. The following words have been attributed to both Florynce Kennedy and Gloria Steinem:

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

Could you determine who said it first?

Quote Investigator: The earliest published evidence located by QI appeared in an issue of the periodical “Off Our Backs” dated June 24, 1971 in which a speech given by the prominent activist Florynce Kennedy at a rally held on May 15, 1971 in Washington D.C. was described:

Florynce Kennedy, author of Abortion Rap defined the situation with her usual clarity: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” She also read parts of the Metropolitan Abortion Alliance’s statement on the media and urged a national boycott of the media sponsors.

The leading feminist Gloria Steinem also used the expression in speeches delivered in 1971, but intriguingly Steinem pointed to another person as creator of this saying. In her 1983 memoir “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” Steinem indicated that the statement was spoken to her and Florynce Kennedy by the “elderly Irish woman driver” of a taxi in Boston. Details are given further below.

So, the quotation was popularized by Kennedy and Steinem, but the origin can be traced back to an anonymous taxicab driver. Top researcher Ralph Keyes noted this fact in his important reference “The Quote Verifier”.

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In August 1971 Newsweek magazine published a “Special Report” about Gloria Steinem which showed that the saying was included in her speeches. Boldface has been added to excerpts:

But for the past year she has been roving the country to raise money and consciousness for the still amorphous and revolutionary state of mind called the Women’s Liberation Movement, speaking in pithy anger (“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament”) to college girls and welfare mothers, to young revolutionaries and however many tailored suburbanites will turn out to listen.

In September 1971 a letter printed in Newsweek responded to the profile of Steinem published a month earlier. The writer repeated the striking adage and credited the words to Steinem:

Gloria Steinem’s statement: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” contains much poignant truth.

In November 1971 an article from the Associated Press news service described a group of 2,000 demonstrators marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. The provocative statement had migrated from orators to placards:

They carried signs with such slogans as: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

In the Winter 1971 issue of “Aphra: The Feminist Literary Magazine” a collection of quotations was published. This periodical provided the earliest evidence known to QI indicating that the famous phrase was pronounced by a cabdriver:

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

—woman cabdriver to Florynce Kennedy and Diane Schulder, 1971

In March 1973 Ms. Magazine published “The Verbal Karate of Florynce R. Kennedy, Esq.” by Gloria Steinem. A variety of quotations were credited to Kennedy by Steinem including the following:

Reproductive Freedom

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

In 1983 Steinem published “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, and a section near the beginning of the work employed a stream-of-consciousness style. Steinem recalled a fortuitous encounter in a taxi:

Talking with Flo about her first book, Abortion Rap, in a Boston taxi and hearing its elderly Irish woman driver say the much-to-be-quoted words: “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

In a 2006 interview in the Boston Globe newspaper Steinem elaborated on the provenance of the quotation:

Steinem brightens. “You know who said that? Years ago, I was in a taxi in Boston or Cambridge. There was an old Irish woman taxi driver. Flo Kennedy, the civil rights activist, was my speaking partner at the time. We were sitting in the back talking about abortion and the taxi driver turned around and she said, ‘Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.’ And I’ve always been so sorry that I didn’t get her name.”

The saying has sometimes been ascribed to other activist women such as Germaine Greer, but the quotation was not actually included in “The Female Eunuch”:

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

Germaine Greer

Australian Writer

The Female Eunuch, 1970

In conclusion, QI believes that this quotation should be ascribed to an anonymous taxi driver in Boston. Florynce Kennedy and Gloria Steinem disseminated the saying and helped it to obtain an enduring spot in the cultural milieu.

(Great thanks to top researchers Ralph Keyes and Barry Popik for their valuable research on this quotation. Special thanks to the anonymous person who asked about this saying. Thanks to Ian Preston for helpfully pointing out a spelling error.)