Daily Dose of the Hitch

From an interview at Mclean's, talking about Mother Teresa:

...her teachings and entire lifetime of work was exerted to make sure that women could not get hold of the means of family planning, so that the effect she had on prolonging and entrenching and deepening poverty and disease hugely outweighed any good she might have done if she’d ever spent the money she raised on charity—which, as it turns out, she did not do anyway.

Hitchens is referring to his larger point that the single best way to end poverty is to empower women, to make sure they have unfettered access to education and help them to break free from the animal cycle of reproduction--which latter, of course, requires granting a woman control over her own body (a shocking concept!). Mother Teresa, of course, dedicated herself in a kind of spittle-flecked insanity to keeping this liberation from happening.