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Amnesty Begins In The Womb

Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Friday, October 08, 2010 2:00 PM

Amnesty International is demanding the decriminalization of abortion throughout Latin America in the name of human rights.

Their statement singles out Cuba (Cuba!) for praise, because it legalized abortion decades ago. Later we are informed:

Governments must meet their international obligations to protect human rights and give priority to sexual and reproductive health programmes, including sex education plans and access to family planning services and information for all, so that all women can decide freely and in an informed manner when they want to have children and how many, without coercion or discrimination.”

Amnesty International switched policies and began advocating for abortion in 2007, so this is not news in a certain sense.

It still breaks my heart, though. There is the evil of abortion. And then there is the evil of deliberately diluting our understanding of what constitutes a human rights violation.

By AI’s standards, holding political dissidents for years in windowless, vermin-infested cells is only as bad as making abortion illegal or teaching people it’s better to abstain from sex outside of marriage.

Clicking through their site, I found many items of interest, including an LGBT rights division—which is defensible when we are talking about protecting homosexuals from states that would kill them or deny their integral human rights—but which also includes opposition to California’s Proposition 8.

Then there’s this document on women’s rights, which sets the group up as an opponent of both religion and culture:

One key reason is the widespread deference to cultural and religious values when it comes to issues of sexuality and women’s control over their reproductive choices. What is considered socially acceptable in terms of sexual relations and family planning, it is argued, depends to such a varying degree on cultural and religious attitudes in each context that an affirmative right to sexual and reproductive autonomy cannot be asserted as a universal right.

Such arguments are often based on a fixed and stereotypical view of “culture” or “tradition,” which denies the variety and heterogeneity of opinion that can exist within one faith or cultural context. They also overlook the fact that societies of all faiths and none have targeted women’s sexuality and reproductive autonomy as a key means of keeping them socially subordinate, and have turned a blind eye even to the most violent manifestations of this form of discrimination.

Yikes! The moral equivalency here between barbaric tribal customs such as clitorectomy on the one hand and upholding the right to life on the other is disturbing.

There’s no recognition in the document that in Western liberal democracies, abuse of conscience and human rights violations against women and girls often come in the form of pressure to abort, or in policies that unwittingly protect statutory rapists by enabling them to hide their crimes.

The world needs independent watchdog organizations to defend dissidents and hold governments accountable for human rights violations. It’s so sad that Amnesty International can no longer claim that mantle credibly.

It no longer knows the difference between human rights violations and moral and cultural standards that protect against them.

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