Nearly three decades before her canonization, Mother Teresa of Calcutta stood before a packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton and delivered a pointed rebuke of abortion—aimed squarely at the most pro-abortion president and first lady the nation had seen up to that time. The date was Feb. 3, 1994, and the occasion was the National Prayer Breakfast, attended by President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, his wife Tipper, and roughly 3,000 legislators, dignitaries, and guests.
The 83-year-old nun, known for her trademark white sari with blue stripes and her life’s work serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, had chosen as her theme a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” She opened with expected topics—love, serving the poor, the family, materialism, and selfishness. But then she turned to the subject of abortion, and the room fell into a different kind of silence.
“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” she said, just a few feet from the Clintons. “And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
She continued, urging that women considering abortion “should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child.” She also spoke of the father’s responsibility, arguing that abortion tells him “he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world.”
Mother Teresa did not spare the broader Western culture. She called out the hypocrisy of those who care about the poor and victims of violence but “are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers.” She advocated adoption as the alternative, giving the child a chance to live.
When she finished, the packed ballroom rose in a long standing ovation. But according to news reports, the Clintons and the Gores remained seated and did not applaud.
Hillary Clinton later wrote about the encounter in her 2003 memoir, Living History. “She had just delivered a speech against abortion, and she wanted to talk to me,” Clinton recalled. “Mother Teresa was unerringly direct. She disagreed with my views on a woman’s right to choose and told me so.”
A story that has circulated ever since claims that Clinton asked Mother Teresa why the United States had not yet elected a woman president. The supposed reply: “Because she has probably been aborted.” The anecdote remains unverified, but it has persisted for three decades.
For the writer of this piece, the image is stark: a slight, stooped nun standing before the most powerful couple in the land, speaking truth to power while they sat in silence. The contrasts—between the saint and the politicians, between applause and stillness—have become a lasting symbol of the divide over abortion in American public life.
Source: pjmedia.com — https://pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/2026/08/15/the-clintons-once-sat-in-silence-while-mother-teresa-took-aim-at-them-on-abortion-n4956169
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