Roe V. Wade Goes Global

Campus Report ^ | February 1, 2008 | Jeremy Hempel

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Roe v. Wade Goes Global

by: Jeremy Hempel, February 01, 2008

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....

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....

[GeronL]

“human right” to be killed before birth?

[Regulator]

Abortion is a human rights violation.