Abortion is a tragic and horrific picture of the brutality of man. Human society is capable of normalizing stupendous depths of evil. Otherwise compassionate people seem completely unmoved about the murder of defenseless children. Yesterday, I was reading A Hunger for God, a 25 year old book and a passionate plea for prayer and fasting for the multiple ills, maladies and atrocities of our world, when I ran across these words from when Bill Clinton was our President.
Mother Teresa’s words are no doubt controversial, but they are controversial not because they are unthoughtful. They are controversial because there is so little actual thought about the effects of abortion culture and commitment to abortion as a solution to an unwanted pregnancy.
Her observation is that abortion is one of the the chief factors leading to the 50 year trend in the brutalization of our society. Our world is not getting more compassionate and less violent. It is becoming more violent and less compassionate and a large factor (not the only factor) is our absurd belief that an act of violence on a defenseless and innocent child is an act of compassion for another human being. I hope these words haunt every reader of the BLOG today. And I pray that it causes every reader to pray for the end of abortion in America. But even more, what we need is a return to the view that abortion is not just illegal but unthinkable in a humane society. Pray for that too.
In February 1995, before the President of the United States at the National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa spoke with courage and directness concerning this erosive effect of abortion.
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.14
This is what Francis Schaeffer meant when he said, “Compassion … is being undermined. And it is not only the babies who are being killed; it is humanness which the humanist worldview is beating to death.”15 (Piper, John, Hunger for God, page 161-162).
Footnotes
14 Quoted from “Mother Teresa Speaks on Abortion,” taken from the Internet Web site, www.castletown.com/teresa2.htm.
15 A Christian Manifesto, p. 455.
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