London - George Bush on Monday night revealed how one of the most traumatic events of his life shaped his anti-abortion stance.
Breaking his silence on his early life, his years in the White House and his heavy drinking, the former US president told how deeply a miscarriage his mother suffered when he was a teenager has affected his thinking.
Barbara Bush, who would go on to become First Lady, had the miscarriage at home in Texas. Distraught, she put the dead foetus in a glass jar so she could take it to hospital.
And during a TV interview, Bush recalled: “She said to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s the foetus,’ “ and gestured as if he was brandishing the jar.
Bush told interviewer Matt Lauer that his pro-life stance was cemented by the experience. “There’s no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life.”
In his new autobiography, Bush describes how he had to drive his mother to hospital, and writes: “I never expected to see the remains of the foetus, which she had saved in a jar. There was a human life, a little brother or sister.”
He says he included the episode in his book not to brandish his anti-abortion credentials but to “show how my mom and I developed a relationship”.
Bush, 64, has barely spoken publicly in the two years since he was turfed out of the White House by Barack Obama, weighed down by the worst approval ratings since President Richard Nixon.
But as Obama struggles to pin all the blame for the US’s economic woes on his predecessor, political commentators believe this may be the moment for Bush to salvage some of his reputation.
His book, Decision Points, tackles some of the biggest crises in Bush’s life, from his unconstrained drinking to his decision to go to war in Iraq. In it, he compares Tony Blair to Winston Churchill over his staunch backing for the war and praises the prime minister’s “courage”.
Published in the US on Tuesday, the memoir is surprisingly candid from the start. The opening chapter, called Quitting, tackles his battle with alcohol.
Bush said his drinking was so bad that he had questioned whether he loved alcohol more than he loved his wife, Laura. Realising that he had an addictive personality, he stopped drinking after waking up “drunk as a skunk” the morning after his 40th birthday party.
With the help of his wife and the evangelist Billy Graham, he embarked on a “one-step” programme whose success, he says, started him on the path to the presidency.
He told NBC that he stopped drinking in 1986 and that - despite rumours to the contrary - he has never even thought about having a drink since then.
“When I go to church, if there’s a wine in the communion, I don’t take the wine in the communion.”
Drinking became “a love, and therefore began to compete for my love with my wife and my daughters”, he said. He says he was never a “chemically addicted” alcoholic, but the anecdotes make clear he had a serious problem.
Describing a particularly embarrassing moment from his drinking days, he recalled: “I’m drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad’s house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura’s there.
“And I’m sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad’s. And I said to her out loud: ‘What is sex like after 50?.’ “
Other guests looked “serious daggers” at him but, years later after he had reached the half-century, the woman sent him a note which read, “Well, George, how is it?” - Daily Mail