Over 30 pro-life organisations have urged the United Nations not to declare abortion a human right.
As the UN prepares to vote – this September – on Sustainable Development Goals which are set to include universal access to “sexual and reproductive health-care services” by 2030, pro-life groups, interpreting such language as including abortion, responded to a submissions invitation from the Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) to make numerous individual requests to the body to recognise the right to life of the unborn and to resist pressures to have abortion recognised as a human right.
Groups responding to the submissions invitation were drawn from the United States, Europe and Latin America and their submissions included testimonies about the mental and physical harm caused by abortion to women, and concerning the the wider harms caused to female populations caused by sex-selective abortions. Other submissions from disability advocacy groups warned that abortion as a right stands as the beginning of a drive to eradicate the lives and the right to life of disabled children.
The appeals to the UNHRC come just weeks after the UN called on Ireland to hold a referendum on abortion in order to move towards “ensuring the cultural, social and economic rights” of women in this country. That call came during an examination by the Geneva-based UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Ireland’s rights record. Noting the country’s constitutional protection for the rights of the unborn, one committee member suggested a referendum to bring Ireland into line with international covenants. In its concluding observations, the committee described Ireland’s abortion laws as “restrictive” and expressed concern at the country’s “criminalisation of abortion under section 22 of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act”.
