Though Blessed Mother Teresa spoke these words over 20 years ago, few can forget the waves her comments made through the carefully patrolled waters of American politics. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa called abortion the “greatest destroyer of peace,” and reasoned “If we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? … By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problem…any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use any violence to get what they want.”
In her now famous article, “A Still, Small Voice,” Peggy Noonan wrote (tongue-in-cheek) that “Mother Teresa is not perhaps schooled in the ways of world capitals and perhaps did not know that having said her piece and won the moment she was supposed to go back to the airier, less dramatic assertions on which we all agree.” Instead of droning on about the topics on which we all agree, Mother Teresa dared to make the audience uncomfortable and addressed the reality of abortion in the United States.
Last Monday, former Texas state senator Wendy Davis addressed students at the University of Notre Dame with a talk entitled, “Rise Up: From Single Mother to Harvard Law.” Her speech centered, in part, on telling her personal story of her two abortions and how she didn’t allow her dreams to be derailed by pregnancy. Davis supports unrestricted access to abortion up until birth and stated that without Planned Parenthood, she likely wouldn’t have been able to “climb the ranks her mother and grandmother could not.”
How did we get from abortion as “safe, legal, and rare” to abortion as a stepping stone toward progress in one’s career?
Davis also explained to students that she aborted her 20-week old unborn child “out of love,” because the baby was diagnosed with a condition that would most probably result in the child’s painful death soon after birth. Davis wrote in an op-ed for CNN that “we made a decision to spare her the suffering we knew was inevitable.” One can only imagine what a painful experience that must have been for Davis and her then-husband, but what does it mean when it is morally acceptable to inflict violence to prevent suffering?
Love, to be true, has to hurt.
Also in the news this week: Pope Francis blessed the eyes of a 5 year old little girl, Lizzy Myers. Lizzy has a disease, Usher Syndrome Type II, which results in a gradual loss of vision and hearing. Why was Lizzy in Rome at a papal audience? Lizzy’s parents created a “bucket list” for their little girl so she would be able to see as much of the world as possible before losing her sight. The family is embracing this suffering, finding meaning and giving their daughter a chance to see something beautiful.
Love, to be true, has to hurt.
Today, suffering is anathema to our culture. We try to avoid it at all costs — and while this certainly is nothing new, what is relatively new is the desire to avoid anything at all that makes us uncomfortable. Students at our universities — which were once fertile ground for intellectual discussion of all points of view — are clamoring for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to alert them of potentially sensitive topics. Just recently students at Emory University demanded a “safe space” after someone scrawled “Trump” in chalk on a sidewalk. No one was harmed, the chalk could easily be washed away — as any toddler could attest — yet this incident made national news.
We live in a culture that demands safe spaces for thoughts, but not for people. What should be the safest place for an unborn child — within its mother’s womb — has become one of the most perilous. And it’s all in the name of progress.
Yet our country was founded on values like the equal dignity of all persons, and the notion that all one needs to achieve one’s dreams is sweat and some hard work — not to trample on the lives of other people, to treat people’s very lives as obstacles that need to be eliminated for our own personal gain. We have forgotten that struggle and suffering have meaning, and that at times, love — the greatest of all human emotions — hurts. We live in a world in which there is so much gray, so much reluctance to call things right or wrong. But we quickly and easily categorize all suffering as bad, and we will stop at nothing to eliminate it — even if it means destroying the essence of our academic institutions, “qualifying” our freedom of speech, even destroying our unborn children.
If only we could find — like Lizzy — peace through suffering and meaning in pain.
Love, to be true, has to hurt.
Jennifer Manning
Jennifer Manning teaches Religious Studies at a Boston area private high school. Find her on Twitter at @jmfmanning.
