The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recently called for Ireland to hold a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment, which recognises the equal right to life of the unborn. The Committee called for Ireland to legislate for abortion on the grounds of rape, incest and threat to the health of the mother as opposed to her life. These steps, the committee argued, were necessary to bring Ireland into compliance international human rights law.
A lot of the debate following has has been about this last point. Is Ireland in breach of international law? How should various treaties be interpreted? How credible is this particular comittee as a human-rights watchdog?
These discussions spectacularly miss the point. As a matter of principle, nobody should care what the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights says about abortion: and in fact, nobody really does.
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Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, which is also calling for repeal of the eighth amendment, recently said that his organisation had “no political or religious axe to grind” on abortion. “We’re not coming at it from a political angle. We’re coming at it purely on the basis of international human rights standards. Ireland is in breach. It’s just a fact,” Mr Shetty said.
This is just ridiculous, and a moment’s thought will reveal why.
What is at issue here is whether or not one can legally kill an unborn human. An unborn child is unquestionably human, and unquestionably a unique organism. Abortion abolitionists look at these facts and then base their position on a simple principle: that human rights belong to all humans. The most important question in this whole debate is “is that statement true?” Everything else is secondary.
To borrow the words of a great abolitionist [1], pro-choice people think that legal abortion is right and ought to be extended. Abortion abolitionists think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That is the substantial difference between the two positions. The idea that one can sidestep this question by appealing to an interpretation of human rights law made by an 18-person UN committee, or to a recommendation by that same committee carrying no legal force and no practical consequences whatsoever, is a complete absurdity and should be recognised as such.
Everyone, at some level, knows this, which is why the elaborate game being played by Amnesty International and co. is so tedious. Nobody doubts that if the UN had called for Ireland’s abortion laws to be strengthened (say by repealing the abortion-on-grounds-of-suicide legislation), that Colm O’Gorman, Ivana Bacik, and other people who take a sincere pro-choice stance would be completely against Ireland implementing the recommendation.
It’s not really important, either, that among the 18 Committee members are representatives from Jordan (where criticism of the King is met with civil penalties and prisoners are executed by hanging) or China (where to start?). Were the Committee were comprised of the 18 most virtuous people in the world, they would still be wrong. If their position rested upon a rock-solid base of international law, they would still be wrong. If the United Nations had no taint of hypocrisy or corruption in any other area [2], they would still be wrong.
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The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights takes the view that human rights begin at birth (a view they share, funny enough, with Amnesty [3]).
I wonder what they would make of the 66 children that were born alive after an abortion in Britain in 2005, and were left to die? An official government review of perinatal mortality notes the following [4] (pg 38):
Sixteen were born at 22 weeks’ gestation or later and death occurred between 1 and 270 minutes after birth (median: 66 minutes). The remaining 50 fetuses were born before 22 weeks’ gestation and death occurred between 0 and 615 minutes after birth (median: 55 minutes)
The UN Committee’s position is that these children did not have an absolute right to life while in their mother’s womb, and could be duly and legally killed. Do the 18 members, I wonder, view the fact that these children were allowed to die on an operating table after leaving the womb as a violation of their human rights?
If the answer is no, why not? Does emerging alive from the womb after doctors have failed to kill you in utero not constitute being “born”? At what point does it become the business of the state to preserve their life? At what point do human rights descend upon a child in this situation? Have they yet descended on abortion survivors likeMelissa Ohden [5] and Josiah Presley [6]?
I also wonder what the UN Committee believes changes about a child when he or she is born. What is their basisfor human rights beginning at birth? I have not yet heard an argument for this. If it’s simply an arbitrary chosen point, then the Committee is a sham.
And if the answer is yes, if the committee does belief the rights of those children were violated, I wonder why they have not yet castigated Britain for allowing this to happen? Do the deaths of 66 infants not merit a mention?
This is a moral question – a question of right and wrong. It cannot be addressed by treaty citations, by sanitised, technical language, by appeal to procedure or convention. Premature babies being left to die on a table demands different language entirely.
The committee’s position is incoherent. It is cruel. It is uncivilised. Its opponents should be supported: laws that enshrine it and give it force should be repealed.
The abortion abolitionist position, by contrast, is based on common-sense intuition, clear and consistent argument, and the same universal human compassion that has throughout human history lead societies to widen their circles of protection.
We believe that human rights belong to all humans.
We believe that fundamental rights can never be based on age, size or location; that legal abortion is state-sanctioned violence against children; that no woman is helped by a ‘medical’ intervention that aims to kill her child; that an aspiration to have every child be a wanted child is not a license to kill the unwanted ones.
We believe in providing economic, social and cultural support to women with unplanned pregnancies, and to their children. We believe in an open and transparent adoption system. We believe that no child should die because of the crimes of their father.
We believe that, as all humans are of equal dignity and worth, with an equal right to life and bodily integrity, it would be a monstrous act to use the health and wellbeing of one as a pretext for taking the life of another.
There are other things we regard as matters of fact: that there is no evidence to show that having an abortion improves mental-health outcomes, that abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s life.
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Empires, governments, churches, NGOs, think-tanks, lobby groups, charities and associations can all be wrong about fundamental moral questions. The United Nations Committee on Social , Economic and Cultural rights can be wrong too – and on this issue, it is. Our government should not only ignore its recommendations: it should denounce them.
Note on terminology: in this post the word ‘abortion’ denotes a procedure that aims to take the life of an unborn child. If trying to figure out whether a given procedure is an abortion or not, just ask yourself if the doctor performing the procedure would be delighted or disappointed to see the child survive it.