Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Casey

“Abortion license” is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s a deliberately legalistic phrase that recasts a constitutional right as a bureaucratic permit, something granted, conditional, and morally suspect. Casey isn’t arguing policy details so much as framing the moral story. By choosing “license,” he implies permissiveness and social decay, the same way “license” contrasts with “liberty” in older civic rhetoric. The line’s intended effect is to make freedom sound like negligence.

The pivot from “freedom and security” to “irresponsibility” is a rhetorical bait-and-switch aimed at a broad audience. Casey borrows feminist vocabulary (“women’s freedom,” “security”) only to claim abortion has betrayed women, not empowered them. Subtext: men, institutions, and sexual partners have been “let off the hook,” and women are left to absorb the consequences alone. The target isn’t only abortion; it’s a sexual culture he’s implying has become consequence-free for everyone except women and children.

The phrase “begins before birth” tightens the argument into a moral timeline: irresponsibility isn’t just present, it’s prenatal. That’s also a strategic move to center fetal life without explicitly arguing fetal personhood; he smuggles in the premise that pregnancy already involves a child.

Context matters. Casey, a prominent Democrat in a party moving toward abortion rights orthodoxy, made a career out of anti-abortion politics in the Roe era, especially in Pennsylvania’s battles that helped produce Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). The quote is calibrated for that moment: it tries to make opposition to abortion sound like protection, and rights talk sound like abandonment.