The UN Abortion Debate Has Shifted in Our Favor

Jan 1, 2021 by

by Austin Ruse, C-Fam:

Twelve years ago, the Bush administration caved in on the phrase “reproductive health.” Even though they knew it was used to promote abortion, they allowed it into the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It remains the only hard law treaty where that phrase appears. This is how slack the Bush administration had become.

Following Bush, during the Obama years, the phrase was sprinkled like salt on meat in dozens, even hundreds of non-binding UN documents. At the beginning of the Trump administration, it got so bad that a significant pro-life group, along with a staff member of an essential and otherwise pro-life UN delegation, announced the term was “clean” and therefore could be accepted whenever it appeared.

One of the significant accomplishments of the Trump administration, along with pro-life organizations at the UN, has been to make that poisonous term controversial again. Utterly reversing tactics, Trump and his team decided they would 1) reject the term, 2) replace the term, or 3) insist on defining the term as excluding abortion. We rarely take a personal victory lap, but quite frankly, this tactic came from the personnel of C-Fam. Furthermore, it was an uphill battle. Pro-lifers inside and outside the administration had to fight other pro-life groups who were against it, while also fighting pro-abortion extremists inside the administration. But it was done: Trump drew a bright red line around that poisonous term.

Perhaps the crowning achievement during these years was the recently-accomplished Geneva Consensus Declaration that reaffirms there is no international right to abortion, and the question of abortion as a matter of law must be left up to sovereign states and not to international institutions. Thirty-four governments have signed onto that document, which has been registered with the UN General Assembly.

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