Barbara Bush Showed Young George "Fetus in a Jar"
The Daily Beast reports:
Undoubtedly the most startling moment in Matt Lauer's conversation with George W. Bush came in the first five minutes of the interview, when Bush recounted his mother's miscarriage—and how she had showed him the fetus in a jar.
"She says to her teenage kid, 'Here's a fetus,'" Bush recounted to Lauer, referring to himself in the third person. "There's no question that it affected me," Bush added.
During a mostly friendly back-and-forth on the younger Bush's time in office, it was a bizarre revelation, and Lauer quickly steered the former president to the more policy-related question of what bearing the episode might have had on his pro-life position while the oddity of the story itself was left unexplored.
The episode helped him bond with his mother, Bush insisted on NBC's Today show Monday. In his memoir, em>Decision Points<, which Lauer read from, Bush wrote: "I never expected to see the remains of the fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital."
Bush's recounting of the incident was brief, and Lauer did not press for logistics, leaving some questions unanswered, including who put the fetus in a jar? Where is it now? And why did Barbara decide to preserve her unborn child in a jar—and then show her son?
Bush reportedly got permission from his mother before writing about the horrifying event in his autobiography, which comes out today. "The purpose of this story was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship," he told Lauer.
