By Joseph Pisani
I recently decided to take a course in public speaking. There’s a lot of bloviating in America today, so it’s a necessary skill to have. Who knows? Someday, I may have to testify before Congress … or my grandson’s pre-school class.
Public speaking is something that has scared me since I was in third grade and had to recite a Christmas poem at Sunnyside School’s holiday assembly. I spent weeks memorizing that poem and knew it cold. The problem was I recited it so fast no one could understand a word I was saying and left the auditorium bewildered and muttering, “What was that all about?”
To prepare for my class, I bought a copy of an anthology titled, “Great Speeches of the 20th Century.” The collection included the historic “Blood, Sweat and Tears” by Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” President John F. Kennedy’s “The Strategy for Peace,” and a speech by activist Margaret Sanger, who founded the organization that later became Planned Parenthood.
In her speech titled, “The Morality of Birth Control,” which was delivered in New York City in 1921, Sanger said society is divided into three groups. The first comprises the intelligent and wealthy members of the upper class who regulate the size of their families and are “the most respectable and moral members of the community.” The second are those who would like to control their family size but don’t know how.
The third, Sanger said, are “The irresponsible and reckless ones who have little regard for the consequences of their acts or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded and of the pauper element, dependent entirely upon the normal and fit members of society for their support.”
She received vigorous applause when she said, “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”
Sanger concluded by saying, “We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble-mindedness and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration.” It was a horrifying vision that has been embraced by many organizations and world leaders.
The collection of speeches also included one by Mother Teresa, who received the Nobel Prize for Peace 40 years ago. In a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. in 1994, St. Mother Teresa said — probably with far less eloquence than Sanger — that killing the unborn is wrong. Unlike Sanger, Mother Teresa believed that abortion “lowers the standards of civilization,” and she dedicated her life to serving the people Sanger described as the “diseased, feeble-minded and pauper element.”
“The poor people are very great people,” she said. “They can teach us so many beautiful things.”
In the modern world, Mother said, so many are concerned about children in India and Africa who die of malnutrition and hunger, “yet millions are dying deliberately by abortion, and this is the greatest destroyer of peace today.”
She was prophetic when she said a culture that encourages abortion inevitably becomes a culture of violence. Reading the daily headlines offers ample proof.
“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,” she said. “And if we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching people to love, but to use violence to get what they want.”
Every day we see countless examples of this, and yet our leaders dismiss the idea there is a correlation between societal violence and abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia.
There are two paths. The path of Margaret Sanger and the path of Mother Teresa. In the end, the Truth of Christ is infinitely greater than oratory. Oratory can’t change people’s hearts. Only prayer can do that in a country so desensitized that killing a baby after it is born is permitted in states like New York.
In her speech, Mother Teresa expressed hope that America could become an example for the rest of the world, a place where all life is sacred, from conception to natural death.
“If we remember that God loves us and that we can love others as He loves us, then America can become a sign of peace for the world,” she said. “From this country, a sign of care for the weakest of the weak — the unborn child — must go out to the world. If you become a burning light of justice and peace in the world, then really you will be true to what the founders of this country stood for.”
There’s a lot of work to be done.