Abortion group, UN committee try to redefine ‘forced pregnancy’ as denial of any abortion

(NEW YORK, C-Fam) A UN committee of human rights experts told the Government of Guatemala that its restrictive abortion laws must change. Unlike many non-binding recommendations of UN rights bodies, the opinion in this case is binding to a limited degree.

The Human Rights Committee, charged with monitoring the implementation of the UN civil rights treaty, told the small Central American nation that its abortion laws violate its human rights obligations. The opinion of the UN treaty body is doubly controversial. Not only does the opinion call for legal abortion. It attempts to redefine the technical legal term “forced pregnancy” to include any denial of abortion.

The committee supported allegations from the abortion law firm Center for Reproductive Rights that Guatemala had allowed the public health system to perpetrate a “forced pregnancy” on a 14 year old. The girl was denied an abortion under Guatemala’s laws and complained of being depressed and suicidal as a result. The global abortion law firm with a $40 million annual budget promotes an international right to abortion through international and national litigation around the world.

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In this case, the Center for Reproductive Rights was able to get the Human Rights committee to agree that the denial of abortion was a “forced pregnancy” and said this was a violation of the UN civil rights treaty. By agreeing with this characterization, the UN committee experts signaled willingness to declare any denial of abortion as a human rights violation. This is a highly provocative theory because it contradicts the existing definition of forced pregnancy in international law, one that was negotiated and adopted by states.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “forced pregnancy” is a technical term to indicate a specific kind of war crime. It is narrowly defined as “the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant…”

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Editor’s Note: Stefano Gennarini writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (https://c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.