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United Nations CEDAW Committee Pushes Syria to Permit Abortion

By Hilary White

NEW YORK, June 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Reporting for the first time to the ‘committee of experts’ overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the UN delegation from Syria agreed to drop objections to article 2 of the Convention.

In meetings with the delegation from Syria, Ferdous Ara Begum, the expert from Bangladesh who serves as the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs for the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, noted that abortion was illegal in Syria. She said the country must implement “legal support” for women to “terminate unwanted pregnancies without penalty.”

Zou Xiaoqiao, the expert from China, also noted that abortion is a punishable offense in Syria and wanted to know what accounted for “gaps between women’s access to health in urban and rural areas, and what measures the Government intended to take to close that gap”.

The legal adviser with the Syrian Commission for Family Affairs, Mona Asa’ad, said that the government was implementing contraceptive programs to combat “unwanted pregnancies”. “Most unwanted pregnancies were the result of women not understanding how to use family planning methods.  People were being encouraged to use family planning to avoid unwanted pregnancy,” she said.

In contrast to the attitude of the Syrians, the delegate from Pakistan, also undergoing its first review, told CEDAW last week that “abortion is considered murder once a foetus is conceived.”

When CEDAW committee members pressured the delegate from Sierra Leone on the lack of contraceptive prevalence in that country, the delegate responded that in Sierra Leone there was a prevailing cultural belief that “children were a gift from God.”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Pakistan Tells Pro-Abortion UN Committee that "Abortion is Murder"
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07053103.html

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