On thinking of what to write about the tragic decision of
Roe v. Wade 40 years, I received an email containing the text of an amicus
brief filed by Mother Teresa. I cannot put it better than here and it is
very much worthwhile repeating in total. Here it is:
This amicus (friend of the court) brief was filed before the
U.S. Supreme Court in the cases of Loce v. New Jersey and Krail et al. v. New
Jersey in February 1994, by Mother Teresa:
_
I hope you will count it no presumption that I seek your
leave to address you on behalf of the unborn child. Like that child I can be
considered an outsider. I am not an American citizen.
My parents were Albanian. I was born before the First World
War in a part of what was not yet, and is no longer, Yugoslavia. In many senses
I know what it is like to be without a country.
I also know what is like to feel an adopted citizen of other
lands. When I was still a young girl I traveled to India. I found my work among
the poor and the sick of that nation, and I have lived there ever since.
Since 1950 I have worked with my many sisters from around
the world as one of the Missionaries of Charity. Our congregation now has over
four hundred foundations in more that one hundred countries, including the
United States of America. We have almost five thousand sisters.
We care for those who are often treated as outsiders in
their own communities by their own neighbors—the starving, the crippled, the
impoverished, and the diseased, from the old woman with a brain tumor in
Calcutta to the young man with AIDS in New York City.
A special focus of our care are mothers and their children.
This includes mothers who feel pressured to sacrifice their
unborn children by want, neglect, despair, and philosophies and government
policies that promote the dehumanization of inconvenient human life. And it
includes the children themselves, innocent and utterly defenseless, who are at
the mercy of those who would deny their humanity.
So, in a sense, my sisters and those we serve are all
outsiders together. At the same time, we are supremely conscious of the common
bonds of humanity that unite us and transcend national boundaries.
In another sense, no one in the world who prizes liberty and
human rights can feel anything but a strong kinship with America. Yours is the
one great nation in all of history that was founded on the precept of equal
rights and respect for all humankind, for the poorest and weakest of us as well
as the richest and strongest.
As your Declaration of Independence put it, in words that
have never lost their power to stir the heart: “We hold these truths to be self
evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness…” A nation founded on these principles holds a sacred
trust: to stand as an example to the rest of the world, to climb ever higher in
its practical realization of the ideals of human dignity, brotherhood, and
mutual respect. Your constant efforts in fulfillment of that mission, far more
that your size or your wealth or your military might, have made America an
inspiration to all mankind.
It must be recognized that your model was never one of
realized perfection, but of ceaseless aspiration. From the outset, for example,
America denied the African slave his freedom and human dignity. But in time you
righted that wrong, albeit at an incalculable cost in human suffering and loss
of life.
Your impetus has almost always been toward a fuller, more
all embracing conception and assurance of the rights that your founding fathers
recognized as inherent and God-given.
Yours has ever been an inclusive, not an exclusive, society.
And your steps, though they may have paused or faltered now and then, have been
pointed in the right direction and have trod the right path. The task has not
always been an easy one, and each new generation has faced its own challenges
and temptations. But in a uniquely courageous and inspiring way, America has
kept faith.
Yet there has been one infinitely tragic and destructive
departure from those American ideals in recent memory. It was this Court's own
decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) to exclude the unborn child from the human
family. You ruled that a mother, in consultation with her doctor, has broad
discretion, guaranteed against infringement by the United States Constitution,
to choose to destroy her unborn child.
Your opinion stated that you did not need to “resolve the
difficult question of when life begins.” That question is inescapable. If the
right to life is an inherent and inalienable right, it must surely exist
wherever life exists. No one can deny that the unborn child is a distinct
being, that it is human, and that it is alive. It is unjust, therefore, to
deprive the unborn child of its fundamental right to life on the basis of its
age, size, or condition of dependency.
It was a sad infidelity to America's highest ideals when
this Court said that it did not matter, or could not be determined, when the inalienable
right to life began for a child in its mother's womb.
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 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.
Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government.
They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right
to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the
pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.
The Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany
recently ruled that the unborn child is entitled to its rights to life
independently of acceptance by its mother; this is an elementary and
inalienable right that emanates from the dignity of the human being.” Americans
may feel justly proud that Germany in 1993 was able to recognize the sanctity
of human life. You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to
this truth.
I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall
you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world. Your nation was founded
on the proposition—very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as
a political insight—that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that
it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and
respect.
I urge the Court to take the opportunity presented by the
petitions in these cases to consider the fundamental question of when human
life begins and to declare without equivocation the inalienable rights which it
possesses.
_
Let me know what you think.
Let the light of our Lord shine upon you!
REM (Ray Makowski) Co-Founder, Director and
Secretary-Treasurer
