“America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe vs. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts–a child–as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the dependent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.” – Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa could say these words with both humility and courage because she radically lived out the principles behind them. She was not merely anti-abortion; she was, perhaps more than any other single person in recent history, intimately concerned with the whole life of every person, from the rich and famous to the outcast and marginalized. She did not seek merely to address the individual moral concern of each choice for or against abortion, but fought against cultural and systemic ways of viewing and treating some people as less than, or as somehow deserving of fewer rights. Are we who claim to be pro-life following in her footsteps, or is our “passion” and “conviction” limited to signing online petitions and righting self-righteous rants about a sin to which we have never personally been tempted? I pray that it would be the former, ever more and more, in our churches and our culture, until the whole contours of our society have changed.
little thoughts 