In a new interview to be aired tonight with NBC’s Matt Lauer to promote his new book, Decision Points, pro-life former President George W. Bush explains a startling conversation that resulted in forming and solidifying his pro-life views.
After his mother Barbara Bush suffered an emotional miscarriage, “she said to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s the fetus,'” Bush told Lauer.
During the interview, President Bush gestures as if he is holding a jar saying the former First Lady showed him the jar containing the baby and that made a tremendous impact on him.
“I never expected to see the remains of the fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital,” Bush says. There was a human life, a little brother or sister.”
The New York Post reports that, in the interview, Bush tells Lauer, “There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life.”
But he also says in the interview “the purpose of the story [in the book] wasn’t to try show the evolution of a pro-life point of view” but “was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.”
It indicates Bush received permission from his mother to include the anecdote in the book.
The story is interesting given that Barbara Bush told the New York Times in 1992, during President George Bush’s re-election campaign, that she supports legalized abortion and didn’t think an amendment against abortion should be a part of the Republican Party platform.
“The personal things should be left out of, in my opinion, platforms and conventions,” she said at the time.
In April, Bush headlined a fundraising banquet for an Indianapolis crisis pregnancy center.
“We are honored to welcome President George W. Bush, whose strong record on life issues demonstrates his belief that every life matters,” Brian Boone, the Life Centers president, told LifeNews.com. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate life – with a keynote address from a public servant who made the sanctity of human life a priority.”
Boone credited Bush with compiling a stellar pro-life record and pointed out that he signed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, Unborn Victims of Violence Act and Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
“Bush’s pro-life policies over eight years included the appointment of two pro-life Supreme Court Justices, an executive order barring federal funds to be used for abortion-related projects abroad, and a rule protecting federally funded health employees from taking part in abortion-related activities or other practices that conflicted with their religious views,” he said.
While Bush compiled a lengthy pro-life record, Obama has promoted abortion and forced Americans to pay for abortions and embryonic stem cell research that destroys human life.
Legatus gave Bush the prestigious Cardinal John J. O’Connor Pro-Life Award at its February event and last October, a Canadian pro-life group gave Bush the first pro-life award he has received since leaving office.
