Geneva Human Rights Meeting Passes Forced Pregnancy Resolution

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Geneva Human Rights Meeting Passes "Forced Pregnancy" Resolution

GENEVA, Switzerland — Employing new language that will enable the United Nations to throw its weight behind international campaigns to liberalize abortion laws in Third World countries, the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted the euphemism "forced pregnancy" in its Elimination of Violence Against Women resolution.

The euphemism, adopted at the urging of feminist groups, suggests that a pregnancy that cannot be terminated is "forced," hence the term can be used to prohibit all restrictions on abortion, according to the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. CFHRI is a nongovernmental organization accredited by the United Nations; it monitors the UN's anti-family agenda.

Meeting in Geneva, the 54th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR) passed a resolution last week condemning what it termed "forced pregnancy."

The 56-member commission concluded its six-week annual session April 24th, and will report its findings to the UN Economic and Social Council this summer.

The CHR resolution, called "The Elimination of Violence Against Women," "condemns all violations of the human rights of women in situations of armed conflict, recognizes them to be violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and calls for a particularly effective response to violations of this kind, including in particular, murder, rape. sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy."

The disingenuous claim by feminist lobbyists that "forced pregnancy" is the same thing as rape is belied by the presence of both rape and "forced pregnancy" in the same sentence of the resolution.

The concept of "forced pregnancy" first appeared in UN debates in the context of the Bosnian conflict, where it was reported that women were forcibly impregnated and had their babies taken from them. In recent years, there has been an aggressive effort among UN feminists to expand this term to mean the lack of liberal abortion laws, and to insert this new meaning into key UN documents.

In a private meeting in Geneva last week, members of the Women's Caucus (of feminist NGOs) said that they will refrain from using the term abortion in future UN documents and speeches since the term is so controversial.

Instead, they will use "forced pregnancy" or "enforced pregnancy," terms which are harder to define and thus conceal the real agenda.

This strategy was made clear as long ago as 1991 in a Utah abortion case (Jane L. v. Bangerter) launched by the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Freedom Project. Some of the same attorneys now pushing the "forced pregnancy" language at the UN argued that case. The plaintiff asserted that any pregnancy that cannot be terminated is a "forced pregnancy" and that it is irrelevant whether the pregnancy results from rape or consensual sex. Moreover, the plaintiff argued that the purpose of restrictions on abortion is to force continued pregnancy on women, and that this sort of "forced pregnancy" is a kind of slavery.

The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute also revealed that the final report following last month's Summit of the Americas meeting in Santiago, as expected, called for the elimination of all abortion laws.

In the Santiago Plan of Action, under a section called "Eradication of Poverty and Discrimination," the heads of state of the 34 American democracies said that governments will "examine the existing laws and their implementation in order to identify obstacles limiting the full participation of women in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of our countries."

Traditional laws prohibiting abortion are widely understood to be just such obstacles, pro-life activists warn.

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This item 354 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org