Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of billionaire Bill Gates, is well-known for promoting contraception and abortion across the globe, both during her marriage to Gates and after. Less well known is that she claims to be a practicing Catholic — and, in a new interview, she claims she has reconciled her faith with her support for practices opposed by the Catholic Church.
Supporting death does not respect life
PEOPLE reported that Gates appeared on The Jamie Kern Lima Show, where she claimed that she “believes in life” while at the same time, supports the killing of innocent preborn human beings. She began by claiming that people in developing countries are better off when they don’t have as many children.
“I was learning from these men and women in villages about their lives. And they would talk about children. And both the men and the women knew that when they could space the births of those children, they were better off,” she said. “Or if they could limit, let’s say, they could limit and decide they were only gonna have three or four instead of six or seven, they knew they could then feed their kids, their kids could go to school. They had a chance, those kids, of maybe growing up and, you know, living their dreams.”
She added, “I started to realize, I believe in life. I believe in these children’s lives. The worthiness of them, the inherent beauty on the day they’re born,” she explained. “But because of a man-made rule in the church that I am in — the Catholic church — we’re not allowing women to have access to contraceptives. And so talk about an incongruency, right? And I had to really then reckon with my faith.”
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But what Gates is missing is the fact that children are worthy not simply once they are born, but from the moment they begin to exist — at fertilization (conception). And it is not incongruent to believe in children’s lives while at the same time opposing practices that reject or end those lives before birth. (Of course, Gates prefers artificial birth control to the idea of training women to use fertility awareness methods or natural family planning to space pregnancies — something endorsed by the Catholic Church and even taught by Mother Teresa and other religious sisters to women in India.)
What is incongruent is claiming to respect life while funding the killing of innocent human lives.
Gates has spent over $1 billion promoting abortion — not merely contraception — around the world, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion organization. Her foundation has paid journalists to promote abortion, has donated to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) — which was known to be behind China’s coercive One Child Policy, which involved forced abortions — and has given tens of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood, America’s top abortion provider.
Rejecting the truth
The abortion industry, with the help of people like Gates, has long promoted contraception and abortion to African women, often arguing that they need to have fewer children, even though culturally, most African countries are pro-life. As Obianuju Ekeocha, a biomedical scientist and the founder of Culture of Life Africa, has explained, this is a form of ideological colonization.
… There isn’t a popular demand. If you go to Africa, what people are asking for every day — because I was born in Africa, I was raised in Africa, I continue to go to Africa many times a year — you just speak to any ordinary woman, and I think contraception might be the tenth thing she says [she needs], if that.
… that’s [birth control] kind of a Western solution, isn’t it? If you speak to the ordinary woman on the streets of Africa, what is she asking for? She’s asking for food. She’s asking for water. She’s asking for basic health care. And contraception continues to be about the last thing she would ever think of.
Yet Gates used these people to rationalize her pro-abortion advocacy, despite the fact that the Catholic Church is pro-life. According to PEOPLE:
As she grappled with the issue, she consulted “some Notre Dame scholars” to learn the history of “how the Catholic church had gotten there, why they’d gotten there.” Once she spent time digging into the lectures, books and teachings of Richard Rohr — whom Melinda described as “a very liberal Jesuit priest” — she “realized, ‘Wow, I need to actually unlearn some of these things because I can’t square the circle.’ “
Rohr’s teachings are not in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has always held that all human beings, from conception to natural death, deserve to be protected and treated with dignity. And it is a scientific fact that preborn children are living human beings, which is specifically why the Catechism says:
Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.
According to Gates, supporting abortion and contraception means believing in “the dignity of life.” She praised herself for choosing to violate the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “I was able to eventually reconcile them and say, ‘No, no, no. This is what I believe and I know to be true. And I am going to speak the truth in the world,'” she explained, adding, “Boy, did it feel right to give voice to what these families and these women were telling me.”
The real truth is that it is impossible for Gates to claim her pro-abortion advocacy and Catholic faith can be complementary — a position that (though he was speaking of Joe Biden at the time) the late Pope Francis called “incoherence.”
