Roe v. Wade Goes Global

There is a trend visible in the international community as the right to abortion slowly becomes international law, a report issued last fall by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (CFHRI) shows.

This all started in 1996 when a conference of agencies, treaty bodies, and organizations was held in Glen Cove, New York, according to Rights By Stealth: The Role of UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Campaign for an International Right to Abortion. The official name for this meeting was the “Roundtable of Human Rights Treaty Bodies on Human Rights Approaches to Women’s Health, with a Focus on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights,” researchers Douglas Sylva and Susan Yoshihara report in Rights By Stealth.

This Roundtable ultimately enabled the treaty bodies to re-interpret treaties (laws) without any supervision by the nations who voted for them. The obligations of the solid and unchanging law would change to evolving legislation; evolving based on the interpretation of the members of the Roundtable.

Treaty bodies are independent experts that supervise how human rights treaties are carried out. Six treaty bodies participated in the discussions including the Committee against Torture (CAT), the Human Rights Committee (HRC), and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The conference also included several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), most notably the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR). These groups all came together for their singular purpose and in the coming years they would carry it out with determination.

The Conference came up with a four-step strategy in order to complete its task:

• First, they would have to make the Conference at Glen Cove sound more important than it really was. They would have to claim that there was “an official consensus by the world community.” The meeting was never “official” and there was certainly no “consensus”. In fact, the idea of abortion was strongly rebuked at the Cairo conference, where it met strong resistance from the Vatican, the United States, and the Muslim World.

• Second, the different groups would work together to spread the idea that abortion is internationally legal. Non Governmental Organizations, or NGOs, would muster up local support of the agenda, UN agencies would act as if the reproductive rights were already rights, and the treaty bodies would keep affirming that the treaties were evolving and not immutable. Not one of these groups had a single elected representative of a nation, as they would bring the attention of strong opposition from the entire world community.

• Third, the Roundtable had to get all the treaty bodies to accept the reproductive rights strategy. While they encountered resistance from Mr. Michael Banton, chairperson of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) who noted that his committee should not be involved in women’s health, the roundtable still pushed their agenda forward.

• The final part of the strategy was to provide treaty bodies with a means to re-interpret various treaties to include abortion. For instance, “CEDAW could apply the right to nondiscrimination on the grounds of gender in relation to the criminalization of medical procedures which are only needed by women, such as abortion.”

The treaty bodies could use already long established human rights such as nondiscrimination, the right to health care, even the right to life, and re-interpret them according to their own beliefs, without any oversight from any nation of the U.N. The influence of the members of the Roundtable at Glen Cove has even affected the laws of individual nations.

The CRR was involved with a domestic case in the high court of Colombia. Monica Roa, a CRR-trained attorney from Colombia sued the country claiming that its anti-abortion law violated its international agreement to protect women’s right to health. In May 2006, the Constitutional Court overturned the law prohibiting abortion by 5-3. The court said it was bound by “the recommendations made by the international authorities in charge of overseeing compliance with CEDAW”. An astounding 44 countries have been pressured in similar circumstances to legalize abortion, all based on the false interpretation of laws that were never designed to include abortion.

One of the real tragedies of this situation is the actual human rights needs that are going unanswered. Issues such as unskilled birthing attendants, unsanitary conditions, poor nutrition, and diseases like anemia and malaria all cause more maternal deaths then “unsafe” abortions ever could. These issues are going unanswered in favor of special interest abortion cases at the expense of women around the world.

Jeremy Hempel is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

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