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No Abortion Left Behind
The Weekly Standard ^ | February 2, 2004 | Joseph Bottum, for the Editors

Posted on 01/23/2004 9:21:58 PM PST by RWR8189

HOW MUCH is worldwide access to abortion worth? What price are the international activists who cluster around the United Nations willing to pay to achieve the ability of any woman--at any place, for any reason--to have an abortion?

We might start with the deaths of more than 6 million children after birth. Of the world's 10 million children who died last year of preventable diseases and starvation, two-thirds could have been saved by effective international intervention through UNICEF, according to a recent essay in the British medical journal the Lancet. But Danny Kaye's old international children's fund has been taken over by abortion activists who have radically shifted the organization's focus away from rescuing children.

Jim Grant, the widely respected executive director of UNICEF, launched what he called the "Child Survival Revolution" in 1982. Upon Grant's death, however, the Clinton administration demanded the appointment of New York activist Carol Bellamy. And under Bellamy, UNICEF has decided its job is not to save sick and hungry children, but to join the great march toward universal sex freedom--agitating for minors' access to condoms, requiring that refugee camps provide abortion services, and handing out sex-education manuals to grade-school students in the third world. "We, a group of concerned scientists and public health managers, call on . . . UNICEF . . . to act on behalf of children," the authors in the Lancet pleaded. "Child survival must be put back on the agenda."

A worldwide decline in democratic government, too, is apparently a small price to pay for bringing about the universal legality of what international documents call "reproductive rights." Why should voters be consulted about the laws that govern them--if consulting actual citizens might not bring about the all-trumping right to abortion? That, at least, is the feeling manifest in recently obtained internal memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a lawyers' nongovernmental organization (NGO) that specializes in suing local and national governments that fail to allow unfettered access to abortion.

A copy of these abortion-strategy memos was mailed anonymously late last year to Austin Ruse, who heads the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey reprinted them in the Congressional Record on December 8, and they make fascinating reading--for they show how NGO activists speak behind closed doors. "There is a stealth quality to the work," one memo noted. "We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions."

Such disingenuousness is necessary for the abortion activists' strategy, which consists primarily of inserting vague passages in as many international treaties, reports, and working papers as possible--and then getting the enforcement agencies and entities such as the European Court of Human Rights to interpret those passages to mean a universal right to abortion has been established. Although the phrase "reproductive rights" is omnipresent in U.N. documents--a draft for the 1999 report from the Cairo + 5 conference, for instance, used it 47 times in the section on adolescents alone--there is not a meaningful definition of "reproductive rights" in any official U.N. resolution.

(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: ngo; unicef; weeklystandard

1 posted on 01/23/2004 9:21:58 PM PST by RWR8189
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To: RWR8189
A worldwide decline in democratic government, too, is apparently a small price to pay for bringing about the universal legality of what international documents call "reproductive rights." Sounds about right for the twisted UNworld ... serial killing of already alive individual humans is somehow defined as an aspect of reproduction. Did Kate Michelman write that document?
2 posted on 01/23/2004 9:25:38 PM PST by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)
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To: RWR8189
You know, if abortions are not allowed how will we feed the kittens? If my neighbor Mrs. Farndo finds that her supermarket no longer carries cat food, she is going to be upset that she cannot feed her cat Toby.
3 posted on 01/23/2004 9:47:10 PM PST by GasparSantiago (Howard Dean is an insane gerbil)
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To: MHGinTN
Ah, Kate Michelman! I'll never forget her being pressed by Robert Novak years ago to admit that she'd had an abortion, which she did admit to. And she'll go to her grave trying to justify that murder of her own child. And she'll be a significant part of any movement to justify her personal horror.
4 posted on 01/23/2004 10:08:14 PM PST by laweeks (I)
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To: MHGinTN
Bump for further review
5 posted on 01/23/2004 10:16:25 PM PST by The_Eaglet (Michael Peroutka for President)
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To: RWR8189
Excellent article.

These people [pro-abortion lobby] are fanatics, in the truest sense of the word: All other issues must be warped to reflect solely their concerns, and the mere existence of opposing views convinces them that radical evil is afoot in the world.

Of all the many things about the pro-abortionists that puzzle me, this one is probably most puzzling. For them, abortion trumps anything else.

I honestly don't understand their fanaticism. Well, aside from diabolical possession, that is.

6 posted on 01/24/2004 3:28:08 AM PST by livius
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To: livius
I honestly don't understand their fanaticism. Well, aside from diabolical possession, that is.

"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - SH

7 posted on 01/24/2004 4:53:32 AM PST by Free_at_last_-2001 (is clinton in jail yet?)
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To: laweeks
I saw that interview with Kate Michelman too! She seemed defensive about her prior abortion -- kept mentioning how she felt no guilt about it, would do it again in a heartbeat, it was her choice, yada yada yada.

I was appalled by the fact that, IIRC, she was ALREADY a mother, had two kids I think, yet CHOSE to KILL her own baby.

I knew then that she was an evil heartless b*tch!

8 posted on 01/24/2004 5:08:47 AM PST by IrishRainy
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To: laweeks
Ah, Kate Michelman! I'll never forget her being pressed by Robert Novak years ago to admit that she'd had an abortion, which she did admit to.

That must have been some interview.

9 posted on 01/24/2004 5:12:10 AM PST by SkyPilot
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To: narses; Land of the Irish; NYer; Salvation
pro-life ping
10 posted on 01/24/2004 1:11:30 PM PST by Dajjal
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To: Dajjal; Akron Al; Alberta's Child; Andrew65; AniGrrl; Antoninus; apologia_pro_vita_sua; attagirl; ..
Ping
11 posted on 01/24/2004 1:31:29 PM PST by Land of the Irish
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To: Dajjal; Akron Al; Alberta's Child; Andrew65; AniGrrl; Antoninus; apologia_pro_vita_sua; attagirl; ..
Ping
12 posted on 01/24/2004 1:32:30 PM PST by Land of the Irish
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To: RWR8189; MHGinTN; Land of the Irish
Seeing as Bush got us into Unesco, I think the title of this piece is very apt--with his mandatory testing (No Child Left Behind Act)including non-academic subjective questions.

Moms have got to get together and get those UNICEF drives out of the schools. The stuff referenced here makes great ammunition.

Parents also have to talk about these issues with their children, as the schools will certainly do so--not nec. in health. These days it could be math, social studies, English--really almost anything.

13 posted on 01/24/2004 8:47:56 PM PST by attagirl (Proverbs 8:36 explains it all)
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah; Desdemona; cpforlife.org; Mr. Silverback
ping
14 posted on 02/03/2004 12:41:44 PM PST by nickcarraway (www.terrisfight.org)
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To: 2nd amendment mama; A2J; Agitate; Alouette; Annie03; aposiopetic; attagirl; axel f; Balto_Boy; ...
ProLife Ping!

If anyone wants on or off my ProLife Ping List, please notify me here or by freepmail.

15 posted on 02/03/2004 1:12:01 PM PST by Mr. Silverback (Pre-empt the third murder attempt-- Pray for Terry Schiavo!)
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To: attagirl
How did Bush get us into Unesco?

From Page 2 of the article:

"This November, Ellen Sauerbrey, representing the United States on the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, promoted a mild resolution--"very near and dear to us in America," as she explained--that urged greater political participation by women around the world. Nineteen pro-abortion NGOs promptly sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Negroponte, rejecting the resolution because it didn't mention abortion.

The examples of fanaticism go on and on. UNESCO has drifted so far into the abortion fight that an irritated Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services, finally sent a letter this month to the U.N. asking what declarations such as "Governments should make abortion legal, safe, and affordable" have to do with UNESCO's supposed mission of promoting education, science, and culture. When Secretary of State Colin Powell cut off American funding for the United Nations Population Fund in 2002--on the reasonable grounds that UNFPA was hopelessly implicated in China's forced-abortion policy--he was immediately attacked by E.U. development and humanitarian aid commissioner Poul Nielson, for creating a worldwide "decency gap" in failing to help UNFPA spread international abortion rights.
16 posted on 02/03/2004 1:21:33 PM PST by hocndoc (Choice is the # 1 killer in the US)
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To: hocndoc
howdy doc! Haven't seen you in a while!
17 posted on 02/03/2004 5:58:00 PM PST by cpforlife.org (The defense and promotion of LIFE is not the ministry of a few but the responsibility of ALL.)
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