Bolivian bishop opposes UN committee's push for abortion
August 04, 2015
A UN committee examining Bolivia's implementation of an international women's treaty sharply criticized the South American nation for its laws protecting unborn human life-- prompting a rebuke from the one of the nation's leading prelates.
"The right to abortion remains legally restricted to cases of rape, incest or when the woman’s health is at risk, leading to unsafe clandestine abortions in cases of unwanted pregnancy," stated the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women of the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. "Such criminalization of abortion has a detrimental and disproportionate effect on rural and indigenous women."
Stating that life is "sacred and inviolable," Archbishop Jesús Juárez Párraga described the committee's action as an attack on national sovereignty.
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Further information:
- Rispetto per la sovranità della Bolivia (L'Osservatore Romano, p. 6)
- List of issues and questions in relation to the combined fifth and sixth periodic reports of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (UN Human Rights)
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Posted by: james-w-anderson8230 -
Aug. 04, 2015 7:55 PM ET USA
Your coverage is very one sided. The UN/Secular side gets 12 lines, whereas Bolivia/Catholic side gets about 2 lines.
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Posted by: kwonbbl1 -
Aug. 04, 2015 5:27 PM ET USA
Right to kill, right to murder, right to dispose life - U.N. Right of Inhumanity.
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Aug. 04, 2015 1:20 PM ET USA
The High Commissioner (high on what, one wonders) must have missed the study published many years ago in the British Medical Journal where more than 10,000 women from most every economic, cultural, and ethnic class were trained in NFP and were thus given a pre-emptive choice about whether to bear a child or not. NFP regulation of births at the outset for sufficient reason is the correct moral solution to "unwanted pregnancy". The study found that NFP is 99% effective in the regulation of births.
