So I keep hearing Christopher Hitchens referring to Mother Teresa's 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which he says that she says that abortion is the greatest threat to world peace.

And I keep thinking maybe he's exaggerating what she said. So I looked up the text of her speech, a homily-filled ramble in which she does, in fact, say:

But I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing, direct murder by the mother herself.

Any pro-choice people here want to try to defend Mother Teresa's statement?

And then she goes on, and on, and on:

And today the greatest means, the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us.
Our children, we want them, we love them. But what of the other millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
And this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere - "Let us bring the child back" - and this year being the child's year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: let us ensure this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year. Have we really made the children wanted?

Hell, she says it three times. The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. Remember, this is 1979. The Soviet Union is still in the height of power. Chinese troops have invaded Vietnam. The world press has finally exposed the horror of Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia. And the greatest threat to world peace, according to Mother Teresa, is abortion.

Again, anybody want to make excuses for this?