The abortion movement is no nearer to gaining an international right to abortion than they were 20 years ago, and any slight gains they have made have faded, according to the leader of a prominent pro-life group.
Austin Ruse, the founding director of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), said Jan. 2 that pro-abortion forces have spent “hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours” over the past twenty years and yet they have “not advanced their agenda even a single syllable past what they got at the Cairo Conference in 1994.”
The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development was used by some groups to try and introduce an international right to abortion. Their effors failed thanks to an alliance of countries and the Holy See.
“Let that sink if for a moment, because it is something that haunts the days and nights of the UN Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation,” Ruse wrote on C-FAM’s website. “They have dedicated a significant portion of their lives to establish an international right to abortion and all they have achieved is vague language on reproductive health and rights that most countries soundly reject as having anything to do with abortion.”
“They are no nearer to an international right to abortion than they were when they began,” he said.
Ruse added that their “slight gains” have also faded, recalling that two years ago, at the UN-hosted 20-year review of the Rio Conference on the environment, delegates “rejected language related to reproductive rights.”
He also noted that pro-abortion language used by the UN Population Fund at recent conferences to mark the 20th anniversary of the Cairo Conference were received by delegates “with polite disdain.”
Ruse further highlighted that efforts to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” new categories of non-discrimination in international law have been opposed because most of the world “rejects” efforts to advance same-sex ‘marriage’ and adoption.
“They have utterly failed to gain any real ground on this question,” he wrote.
Still, he noted that anti-life and anti-family forces “very much control” the UN machinery, and he cited agencies such as the UN Population Fund, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. Despite having little to show for their efforts, Ruse warned they display “no sign of letting up.”
“This is why the UN remains one of the most important battlegrounds in the global fight for life and for family,” he said. He added that it is “quite remarkable” that a small band of largely unknown pro-life groups and individuals continue to defeat “some of the most powerful forces in the world.”
The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute is a pro-life organisation that seeks to defend life and family at international institutions and to publicize the debate.
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On the NET: C-FAM
