Intimate Violence

Since her recent canonization, Mother Teresa’s letter on abortion, addressed to the US Supreme Court, has been making the rounds. It’s a call to America to live up to our own stated values, and includes this penetrating analysis of the wider effects of legalized abortion:

“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 domination over the independent 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.”