"I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child—a direct killing of the innocent child—murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?…
"By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."
Here's the source of these quotes: National Prayer Breakfast speech (Washington, D.C, February 3, 1994)
ReplyDeleteThanks again for reminding me of them.
Sounds like a pretty strong ideological commitment against abortion, to the point that there's supposedly some kind of causal chain between aborting a fetus and killing for land.
ReplyDeleteThere's a kernel of truth to Mother Theresa's point, but it's quite a jump to attributing war to it.
Silas, I have explained what *I* mean when I use "ideology" here. As I am using the term, a usage I did not invent, to have an opinion about something, even a very strong opinion, is not an "ideology."
ReplyDeleteOkay, you can ignore that and reply to the rest then, if you don't mind too terribly:
ReplyDeleteSounds like a pretty strong commitment against abortion, to the point that there's supposedly some kind of causal chain, that most would deem questionable, between aborting a fetus and killing for land.
There's a kernel of truth to Mother Theresa's point, but it's quite a jump to attributing war to it.
Well, she views abortion as a form of war ("because it is a war against the child"). And therefore, as war itself, it is "the greatest destroyer of peace today."
ReplyDeleteI don't think she was saying anything like "The Gulf War was caused by abortion." But I could be wrong.
Bl. Mother Teresa laments the loss of a consistent civil authority. Ultimately, she laments relativism.
ReplyDeleteIf the Gulf War was primarily about land or obtaining oil, then it was a case of using "any violence to get what they want." Abortion, according to Bl. Mother Teresa, causes this mentality.
Yes, Alan, absolutely. But I don't think that she implies abortion was the immediate cause of any particular war, or that war would disappear without abortion, which *seems* to me to be what Silas thought she was claiming.
ReplyDelete