No Abortion Left Behind
No Abortion Left Behind How much is worldwide access to abortion worth? What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any...
...asking what declarations such as "Governments should make abortion legal, safe, and affordable" have to do with UNESCO's supposed mission of promoting education, science, and culture...
...Meanwhile, Douglas A. Sylva, the vice president of Ruse's group, reports that the U.N.-backed European Population Forum this month blamed the United States for bringing, as one official put it, "near-collapse to international gatherings on children's rights, development and population by opposing any language that might allow for abortion...
...A worldwide decline in democratic government, too, is apparently a small price to pay for bringing about the universal legality of what international documents call "reproductive rights...
...The fundamental job of international agency in coming years, the president of International Planned Parenthood explained, will be to fight the opponents of abortion by "discrediting their pseudo-science and unmasking their ideological motives...
...This November, Ellen Sauerbrey, representing the United States on the U.N...
...We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition...
...The pro-abortion fanatics have taken over the entire international forum...
...Their adversaries seem to them demons and monsters, against whom no tactic of deceit or slander is ever forbidden...
...We, a group of concerned scientists and public health managers, call on . . . UNICEF . . . to act on behalf of children," the authors in the Lancet pleaded...
...At the Cairo world conference on population and development in 1994, or the Beijing conference on women in 1995, the international community did little to hide the centrality of its abortion agenda or its disdain for the opponents of abortion...
...But the memos do at least reveal the extent to which the activists for international abortion hate the forms and participatory nature of democratic government...
...Every time a court admits one of these "soft norms"—as the U.S...
...When Secretary of State Colin Powell cut off American funding for the United Nations Population Fund in 2002—on the reasonable grounds that UNFPA was hopelessly implicated in China's forced-abortion policy—he was immediately attacked by E.U...
...We do not condone forced sterilizations," one activist explained, "but no one can deny that Fujimori's program was excellent in terms of access and information...
...These people are fanatics, in the truest sense of the word: All other issues must be warped to reflect solely their concerns, and the mere existence of opposing views convinces them that radical evil is afoot in the world...
...directives, international court decisions, and treaty-organization minutes...
...Why should voters be consulted about the laws that govern them—if consulting actual citizens might not bring about the all-trumping right to abortion...
...Supreme Court did in its Lawrence decision last Novem-ber—the activists move closer to achieving their goal...
...Commission on the Status of Women, promoted a mild resolution—"very near and dear to us in America," as she explained—that urged greater political participation by women around the world...
...There is a stealth quality to the work," one memo noted...
...Only zealotry and extremism can explain all this: the warping of every institution, every issue, and every occasion to concern abortion...
...Our goal is to see governments worldwide guarantee women's reproductive rights out of recognition that they are bound to do so," the center's memos admit—and, "What good is all our work if the Bush administration can simply take it all away with the stroke of a pen...
...Such disingenuousness is necessary for the abortion activists' strategy, which consists primarily of inserting vague passages in as many international treaties, reports, and working papers as possible—and then getting the enforcement agencies and entities such as the European Court of Human Rights to interpret those passages to mean a universal right to abortion has been established...
...ambassador to the U.N., John Negroponte, rejecting the resolution because it didn't mention abortion...
...And to achieve the ability of any woman—at any place, for any reason— to have an abortion, they are willing to pay any price...
...The memos are "privileged communications, proprietary information, and trade secrets" that must be returned unused, since "disclosure of this material has caused, and further disclosure will cause, CRR irreparable harm...
...The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy issued a press release declaring the "apology is part of a right-wing strategy to limit family planning options in Peru...
...Various women's groups this summer, for instance, denounced the government of Peru—because the Peruvian congress apologized for the more than 200,000 poor women coerced into sterilizations under the 1990s "compulsory family planning program" of President Alberto Fujimori...
...documents—a draft for the 1999 report from the Cairo + 5 conference, for instance, used it 47 times in the section on adolescents alone—there is not a meaningful definition of "reproductive rights" in any official U.N...
...resolution...
...A copy of these abortion-strategy memos was mailed anonymously late last year to Austin Ruse, who heads the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute...
...And under Bellamy, UNICEF has decided its job is not to save sick and hungry children, but to join the great march toward universal sex freedom—agitating for minors' access to condoms, requiring that refugee camps provide abortion services, and handing out sex-education manuals to grade-school students in the third world...
...Freshly fired pistols litter the floors of the United Nations and the World Court— all the treaty organizations at which the world's legal and practical norms are decided these days...
...The memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights are hardly the long-sought smoking gun that at last exposes the schemes of the pro-abortion NGOs...
...Their legal briefs routinely cite phrases they themselves crafted in U.N...
...It is essential to demonstrate the truly dangerous consequences of their approach...
...But Danny Kaye's old international children's fund has been taken over by abortion activists who have radically shifted the organization's focus away from rescuing children...
...That, at least, is the feeling manifest in recently obtained internal memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a lawyers' nongovernmental organization (NGO) that specializes in suing local and national governments that fail to allow unfettered access to abortion...
...development and humanitarian aid commissioner Poul Nielson, for creating a worldwide "decency gap" in failing to help UNFPA spread international abortion rights...
...The examples of fanaticism go on and on...
...Child survival must be put back on the agenda...
...Chris Smith of New Jersey reprinted them in the Congressional Record on December 8, and they make fascinating read-ing—for they show how NGO activists speak behind closed doors...
...The cease-and-desist letter the center's president sent Austin Ruse after these embarrassing memos were leaked to him is hilarious in its arrogance and frankness...
...These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions...
...What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any woman—^at any place, for any reason—to have an abortion...
...Upon Grant's death, however, the Clinton administration demanded the appointment of New York activist Carol Bellamy...
...Joseph Bottum, the Editors...
...Nineteen pro-abortion NGOs promptly sent a letter to the U.S...
...We might start with the deaths of more than 6 million children after birth...
...Although the phrase "reproductive rights" is omnipresent in U.N...
...Jim Grant, the widely respected executive director of UNICEF, launched what he called the "Child Survival Revolution" in 1982...
...UNESCO has drifted so far into the abortion fight that an irritated Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, finally sent a letter this month to the U.N...
...Of the world's 10 million children who died last year of preventable diseases and starvation, two-thirds could have been saved by effective international intervention through UNICEF, according to a recent essay in the British medical journal the Lancet...
...In its brief in that case, the center explicitly insisted that the performances of international courts had already established a "customary right to abortion" that American courts are obligated to obey...
...And the harm is, finally, the revelation of the circularity in the abortion activists' technique...
...Perhaps the most interesting portion of the memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights is the admission that this strategy has failed thus far to establish the "soft norm" of abortion—for the center claimed exactly the opposite two years ago when it brought suit against the Bush administration for reinstituting the ban on federal agencies' funding of international organizations that promote abortion...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 20
