The late pro-life heroine Mother Teresa is to be featured on a US stamp according to a release by the U.S. postal service. Although in making the announcement Wednesday, the postal service did not mention her pro-life stand, the revered Roman Catholic nun and saint was a fearless pro-lifer, happy to put her fame at the service of the unborn threatened by abortion.
When invited to the White House Prayer Breakfast in 1997 by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa spoke clearly against abortion. “What is taking place in America is a war against the child,” she said. “And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another.”
Three years earlier Mother Teresa was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying, “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. 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 independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.”
The Postal Service noted that Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, in Skopje in what is now the Republic of Macedonia, Mother Teresa devoted her life to the poor in India, founding an order of nuns to work for the “poorest of the poor.”
President Ronald Reagan presented Mother Teresa with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985. In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress awarded Mother Teresa honorary US citizenship, an honor which has only been bestowed on five other people. In 1997, Congress awarded Mother Teresa the Congressional Gold Medal for her “outstanding and enduring contributions through humanitarian and charitable activities.”
Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on September 5, 1997, and a decade later was beatified by Pope John Paul II, making her “Blessed” Teresa of Calcutta.
Responding to critics who asked who would be willing to care for an unwanted child, Mother Teresa said, “Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child, and be loved by the child. From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortions. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents, and have grown up so full of love and joy!”
