NEW YORK, October 5 (C-Fam) UN experts said abortion-on-demand is “at the very core of every women and girl’s fundamental right to equality, privacy and physical and mental integrity and is a precondition for the enjoyment of other rights and freedoms,” in a lengthy statement released on what abortion groups call “Safe Abortion Day.”

They also said conscientious objection “cannot be a basis for denying women access to abortion” and governments had to remove other barriers to abortion, including cost and geographic accessibility. And they denigrated laws limiting abortions to later stages of pregnancy or requiring informed consent as “designed to control women’s decision-making.”

The experts also attacked pro-life advocates.

“Some propagate a dangerous rhetoric that the rights of a pregnant woman and fetal interests must be equally protected,” they complained.

“The claim often made by opponents of abortion that their stance is “pro-life” is misleading,” they said.

The experts cited maternal health data from the World Health Organization to support legalization of abortion. But global health data does not show that maternal deaths decrease where abortion is legal. The data shows that maternal deaths decrease where maternal health improves regardless of abortion laws. In fact, Chile and Ireland, which until recently had complete bans on abortion, were leaders in maternal health long before allowing abortion.

And the experts also said that “an estimated 225 million women worldwide are deprived of access to essential modern contraception,” a claim that has been described as false and misleading by international experts. In fact, less than 2% of women in the developing world “lack access” to family planning according to the Guttmacher Institute’s own surveys.

It should be noted that abortion advocates within the UN bureaucracy do not have the warrant to tell countries what to do about abortion. In fact, the guiding document on this issue is the Cairo Program for Action which insists these issues are up to national governments and not the international body.

Global abortion advocates reacting to the Trump administration, which has taken strong pro-life positions in international negotiations, and is expected to ramp up pressure on countries to take abortion out of UN policy. In recent negotiations in Geneva, the U.S. delegation pushed back hard against the phrase “reproductive health” which abortion activists use as a synonym for abortion. Abortion groups are preparing for stiff opposition in upcoming negotiations in the UN General Assembly.

“Of the many challenges to gender equality that women face throughout their lives, the area of women’s sexual and reproductive health remains one of the most contested and is among the fields in which women are facing the biggest backlash,” the experts lamented in the press release.

Additionally, last week at UN headquarters UN agencies and European donor nations met to renew their commitments in the “She Decides” campaign. The campaign has raised over $600 million to bail out the abortion industry in a direct challenge to the Trump administration’s reinstatement of a complete ban on U.S. funds for groups that promote and provide abortions.

View online at: https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/un-experts-say-pro-lifers-dangerous/

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