The Vatican recently announced that Pope Francis has approved the canonization of Mother Teresa, the beloved founder of the Missionaries of Charity. She will be canonized in September. In the same month, Hillary Clinton, who met Mother Teresa on multiple occasions as the first lady, will conceivably be running the campaign circuit to garner the votes she’ll need to win the White House in November.
In the 1990s, Mother Teresa made a visit to Washington, D.C., on which she addressed leaders and prominent journalists about the horrific state of abortion in the U.S. As reported by National Right to Life News Today, the following remarks by the saint were met with enthusiastic applause from all present except Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore and his wife. Mother Teresa stated:
But 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? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
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 its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter and acclaimed journalist Peggy Noonan recounted the scene of nearly-unanimous receptivity to Mother Teresa’s powerful words:
Well, silence. Cool deep silence in the cool round cavern for just about 1.3 seconds. And then applause started on the right hand side of the room, and spread, and deepened, and now the room was swept with people applauding, and they would not stop for what I believe was five or six minutes. As they clapped they began to stand, in another wave from the right of the room to the center and the left.
But not everyone applauded. The president and first lady, seated within a few feet of Mother Teresa on the dais, were not applauding. Nor were the vice president and Mrs. Gore. They looked like seated statues at Madame Tussaud’s. They glistened in the lights and moved not a muscle, looking at the speaker in a determinedly semi-pleasant way.
Indeed, a main pillar of Clinton’s platform is her unapologetic stance on elective abortion on-demand, which she reiterated earlier this month in an interview with Fox News.
Asked whether she supported abortion in every stage of pregnancy, Clinton initially smoke-screened her stance by launching into a diatribe about current events at the Supreme Court – namely, that the justices there are examining the constitutionality of House Bill 2, the Pro-Life Omnibus Bill of 2013. She harnessed the case to iterate her talking point that abortion “is not much of a right if it is totally limited and constrained” (we can safely assume she believes HB 2 limits abortion). And by unlimited she means (as she would admit momentarily) abortion without any exceptions.
But the anchor didn’t let Clinton circumvent the question quite so easily. He pressed: “Just to be clear: without any exceptions?” To which Clinton responded with vague disapproval of very late abortion in some circumstances (her purported “record” of such disapproval, however, is severely undercut by her cheerleading for the grotesque and inhumane partial-birth abortion method). Clearly, time has not rendered Hillary Rodham Clinton any wiser on the sanctity of human Life than she was during her silent demonstration of disagreement with Mother Teresa so many years ago.