(C-Fam – New York) The World Health Organization (WHO) has put off a decision to admit a radical pro-abortion organization into official relations and launch a three-year collaboration. The proposed partnership with the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) drew sharp criticism from a coalition of pro-life groups led by C-Fam (publisher of the Friday Fax) that called upon the WHO Director-General to reconsider the alliance.
The letter pointed out that partnering with the abortion litigation group would compromise the UN’s health organization’s integrity and expose it to increased risk of the withdrawal of U.S. funding under a future pro-life administration.
CRR has been at the forefront of pushing for an international right to abortion since the 1990s, and has claimed credit for the liberalization of national abortion laws in Ireland and other countries. After attempts to create an international human right to abortion failed at major international conferences in 1994 and 1995, CRR conspired with UN agencies and independent experts working for the UN’s human rights office to insinuate a right to abortion into international human rights treaties. None of the UN’s nine core human rights treaties mention abortion, either directly or euphemistically.
As noted in the open letter, a 2003 CRR internal strategy document leaked to C-Fam laid out the organization’s intentions to use the UN’s human rights mechanisms and agencies to pressure countries on abortion, despite the fact that the General Assembly repeatedly denied abortion is a human right.
The coalition letter included a variety of pro-life and conservative organizations that work at both a national and international level. The letter argues that CRR “proved incapable of providing accurate legal information and has repeatedly compromised scientific evidence in its advocacy materials in favor of its preferred policy outcomes.”
Nevertheless, CRR’s collaboration with the WHO is not new….
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.
