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Drumbeat Continues for US Ratification of UN's CEDAW

CEDAW compliance committee has pressured 37 nations to liberalize abortion laws

By Samantha Singson

NEW YORK, January 25, 2007 (C-FAM/LifeSiteNews.com) - Martha Burk of the National Council of Women’s Organizations has challenged senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden (D-Del) to schedule a vote in the US Senate on CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) on International Women’s Day, March 8th.

Burk, who is best known for her miserably failed attempt to get corporations to dump their sponsorship of the Masters Golf Tournament, criticized the United States for being the “only holdout in the industrialized world” for not ratifying the CEDAW Convention. Burk accuses conservatives for misrepresenting the convention and portraying CEDAW as an “international abortion rights treaty”. Burk says that CEDAW “does not even mention abortion and, in fact, guarantees rights for married women and mothers” and characterizes the CEDAW as a “simple declaration that women and girls are equal human beings with men and boys.”  Burk did not mention the aggressively pro-abortion directives of the CEDAW Committee.

While President Jimmy Carter signed the CEDAW Convention in 1980, it has never been sent to the floor of the Senate for ratification and to this day remains in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In a report published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in August, CRS analyst Luisa Blanchfield outlined the Bush Administration’s concerns regarding the treaty.  They include “the vagueness of the text of CEDAW”, “the record of the CEDAW committee that reviews and comments on the implementation [of the provisions of the convention into national law]” and “controversial interpretations of the CEDAW Committee’s recommendations to States Parties.”

 The CRS report reiterates the now common argument of radical feminists that the treaty is “abortion neutral”, since the term is never mentioned in the convention text.  In a conversation with the Friday Fax, Blanchfield acknowledged that the CRS report does not do an in-depth analysis of the abortion directives of the CEDAW Committee, which is the main complaint of conservatives opposed to US ratification.

Conservatives point out that radical feminists, like Burk, and the CRS report oversimplify the problem. One source told the Friday Fax that CEDAW “is not merely a ‘simple declaration’ that women and men have equal rights” but that CEDAW is “a binding international treaty with a compliance committee that has pressured no less than 37 sovereign nations to liberalize their abortion laws.” While the document is silent on abortion and silent on reproductive health, the CEDAW committee created a “general recommendation” that the Committee claims allows them to interpret the document as including abortion. This controversial move was done by the Committee without consultation of the governments that originally and carefully negotiated and subsequently ratified the treaty.

The Bush Administration is continuing its legal and policy review of CEDAW. It is expected that Senate Democrats will move on the treaty sometime in the coming weeks or months.

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