Post Office Issues Mother Teresa Stamp, Will Buyers Remember Pro-Life View?
by Maria Vitale
LifeNews.com Opinion Columnist
September 6, 2010
LifeNews.com Note: Maria Vitale is an opinion columnist for LifeNews.com. She is the Public Relations Director for the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and Vitale has written and reported for various broadcast and print media outlets, including National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and AP Radio.
The U.S. Postal Service’s issuance of a stamp in honor of the late Mother Teresa shows just how monumental a figure the diminutive sister was in 20th century life. Mother Teresa embodied Christianity in action — preferential treatment for the poor, tireless self-giving, a beacon of joy in the midst of the world’s darkness.
But I just wonder how many people who purchase a Mother Teresa stamp will reflect upon her courageous pro-life stand?
The saint of Calcutta rejected the notion that abortion was a rational response to poverty. She saw abortion as completely irrational—a barbaric answer to passing problems. In the new book Where There is Love, There is God, editor Brian Kolodiejchuk weaves together a number of Mother Teresa’s most profound statements. A number of these concern the sanctity of human life.
Take this example: “The other day, I read something that the unborn child is not a child until it is born. I don’t know, I don’t know how anybody could say a thing like that. For there is life, the life of God in the child, and that child has been created for greater things, to love and to be loved.”
In fact, Mother Teresa saw abortion as a sign of immense poverty—spiritual poverty: “Great poverty! There is the child—the unborn child, a little child in the womb of the mother. And she doesn’t want the child. She’s afraid of the child. ‘If I have to feed one more child, if I have to educate one more child, I cannot buy another car, I cannot have a color television; therefore I must kill the child.’”
Mother Teresa also saw abortion as an enemy of peace. “…This is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today, because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”
In addition to advocating for the child in her speeches, Mother Teresa gave concrete help to families facing unexpected pregnancies. “From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortion. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopted parents and have grown up so full of love.” In the view of this advocate for the poor, adoption was the healing choice, abortion the destructive one.
Mother Teresa knew misery. She dealt with it, up close and personal, every day. She raised her arms to embrace the outcasts, the lepers, the people that the rest of society would have rather forgotten. But amid all those poor souls that she could see, she never forgot those who were truly hidden from view—the preborn children.
When we buy a Mother Teresa stamp, we are doing more than just showing our respect for a modern-day hero. We are also embracing her credo, that every human being is worthy of our love, whether they live in the streets of Calcutta or in their mothers’ wombs.
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