FORMER US PRESIDENT George W Bush has revealed that his stance on abortion was greatly shaped by an incident as a teenager when his mother had a miscarriage – and showed him a jar containing the foetus.

Bush, in a TV interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer as part of the promotional tour for his memoirs, published tomorrow, said the episode had had a deep impact on his philosophy “that we should respect life”.

The New York Post reports that the former President’s book, called Decision Points, recounts that the devastating miscarriage had happened while his mother was in the family home in Texas, and that she had kept the expelled foetus in a jar to bring to the local hospital.

“There was a human life, a little brother or sister,” Bush told Lauer, though insisting that “the purpose of the story wasn’t to try show the evolution of a pro-life point of view – it was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.”

Bush also defended his decision not to offer any opinions of his successor, Barack Obama, saying the job of a president was intense enough without having to answer to previous incumbents offering their own thoughts.

“President Obama has plenty of critics,” Bush said, “and I’m not going to be one.”

Bush has been on a media blitz of late in attempts to promote the book, in which he also describes his first-hand reaction to the September 11 attacks, and speaks of his struggles with alcoholism.

“It became… a love,” Bush told Lauer, “and therefore began to compete for my love with my wife, and my daughters.  For a while, I was a rootless guy, and drinking didn’t compete with anything.

The New York Times’ reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, has described the book as “part spin, part mea culpa, part family scrapbook, part self-conscious effort to (re)shape his political legacy”.