Database: Pressure on countries to legalize abortion doesn’t stop when they give in
(Washington, D.C., C-Fam) C-Fam’s new human rights database shows how pressure on pro-life countries does not diminish once they allow abortion. It increases until they allow abortion on demand and become radicalized abortion advocates themselves.
This week, the committee monitoring the UN treaty on discrimination against women published its reports on ten countries that had ratified it. Among them were two countries that used to have strong pro-life laws but have repealed them in recent years: Ireland and Mexico.
The CEDAW Committee has a long history of pressuring both countries to liberalize their abortion laws. In 1999 and 2005, it called on Ireland to facilitate a national dialogue about changing their restrictions, and in 2017, it demanded that the Eighth Amendment to Ireland’s constitution be amended to allow abortion, as well as legalizing abortion on broad grounds and decriminalizing it in all cases.
Ireland did repeal its constitutional protections for the unborn in 2018. However, the CEDAW Committee continues to push Ireland to go further. It welcomes the passage of Ireland’s law legalizing abortion, but expresses concern about the lack of available abortion services, the practice of conscientious objection to abortion by health care workers, and the stigma that still remains toward abortion. It asks Ireland to “consider the possibility of fully decriminalizing abortion and abolishing the mandatory three-day waiting period.”
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Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion at the federal level in 2021. The CEDAW Committee had been calling for this since 1998. Now it is telling Mexico to harmonize abortion laws across the different Mexican states in order to ensure access to legal abortion.
In its recent review, the committee expressed satisfaction about the Supreme Court ruling, but noted that nine states still criminalize abortion. They reiterated their call to “harmonize criminal law provisions with legislative advances on abortion access,” to dismiss cases brought against women accused of having…
Editor’s Note: Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. 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.
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Guest Column·By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.
