In a dramatic happening in Washington, D. C. earlier this month, President Clinton’s policies were publicly rebuked by Mother Teresa. The occasion was the interdenominational National Prayer Breakfast, an important annual event attended by hundreds of Washington officialdom and an audience from all over the country.
President and Mrs. Clinton and Vice President and Mrs. Gore sat stony-faced on the platform. But the crowd responded enthusiastically to Mother Teresa, breaking out in several rounds of spontaneous applause.
Mother Teresa’s message that abortion is an act of violence came through loud and clear. “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion,” she said, “because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
Continuing, she said, “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 she has brought into the world.”
“That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble,” she added. “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.”
Offering to accept any baby who would otherwise be aborted, Mother Teresa said: “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.”
President Clinton has made abortion a centerpiece of his Administration’s social policy. He lifted the ban on abortion counseling in federally funded clinics, and he lifted the ban on federal funding of fetal tissue research (which takes tissue from aborted babies while they are still alive in the womb). He provided taxpayer funds for abortions in military hospitals overseas, and he started the process of approving the importation of the abortion pill RU-486.
Clinton fought (unsuccessfully) to force the taxpayers to pay for all Medicaid abortions by trying to repeal the Hyde Amendment. He is now trying to pass his socialized medicine bill, which would pay for all abortions whether women are rich or poor, subsidize abortion providers in areas that lack facilities, and finance public school clinics that would do abortion referrals.
Clinton appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court a woman (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) whose public position is that the Constitution should be interpreted to require the taxpayers to pay for abortions, something that even the (BF)Roe v. Wade(end BF) Court has refused to do.
Clinton didn’t reveal what was going through his mind as Mother Teresa lectured him, but his next stop the same day was a junior high school in an impoverished Washington, D.C. neighborhood. When one student asked him how family values could be restored, he dove into the subject head first in a far more flamboyant way than any speaker at the 1992 Republican National Convention (against which the media have carried on a torrent of criticism for allowing speakers to talk about “family values”).
Calling the subject “a big cultural thing,” Clinton preached morality to the students. He said, “Is it right or wrong if you’re a boy to get some girl pregnant and then forget about it? I think it’s wrong.”
Continuing, he said, “I think it’s not only wrong for them, I think it’s wrong for you. It’s something you pay for the rest of your life. You carry that in the back of your head: somewhere there’s some child out there you didn’t take care of who’s in terrible shape because of something you didn’t do.”
This confused bit of moralizing on the part of the President indicates he knows something is wrong with teenage sex, but he’s not sure what it is. Is it the act that gets a girl pregnant? Or is it having a baby?
Clinton’s moralizing must be read in the context of the fact that he is a consistent supporter of abortion. In his view, why not let abortion eliminate all those inconvenient consequences?
Having abortion legally available is precisely what makes it easy for boys to “get some girl pregnant and then forget about it.” As one student said during the question period after one of my college lectures, “We just have to have abortion available so I can enjoy the pleasure and intimacy of sexual intercourse.”
Does that puff of pleasure warrant the emotional and physical trauma it causes the teenagers and their parents? Condoms do little to protect against disease, and they do nothing at all to protect against heartbreak.
President Clinton, since you have taken it upon yourself to tell schoolchildren that some acts are “wrong,” how about trying to find out what exactly it is that is wrong?
