News

By Piero A. Tozzi and Susan Yoshihara

  NEW YORK, May 22, 2008 (C-FAM)- Pro-life U.S. congressmen, lead by Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Bart Stupak (D-MI), rescued a congressional resolution supporting reduction of women’s mortality at home and abroad from surreptitiously advancing the UN’s pro-abortion agenda. House Resolution 1022, as now drafted, promotes both “maternal health and child survival” without a stealth promotion of abortion.

  The language that was removed by Smith and Stupak called for funding of “global initiatives” and the recognition of maternal health as a “human right.” Using such language would have lent U.S. support for a new pro-abortion initiative launched at a London conference last October called “Women Deliver.” At the Women Deliver conference pro-abortion advocates launched the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights that seeks to link the maternal mortality issue with access to abortion while furthering development of “soft law” norms that include abortion as a human right. 

  The Women Deliver conference, organized and chaired by the world’s top abortion advocates, including International Planned Parenthood Federation, Ipas and “Catholics” for a Free Choice, was also sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization in addition to the UNFPA.

  House Resolution 1022’s primary sponsor, Lois Capps (D-CA), was one of three members of Congress that attended the Women Deliver conference. A number of pro-life members of Congress, unaware of the provenance of the global initiative and health rights language, originally signed onto the draft version of the resolution. 

  One misstatement that remains uncorrected in the present version is the assertion that “an estimated 536,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth”– a number touted at the Women Deliver conference but unsubstantiated by the UN’s own statisticians.

  In a statement preceding passage of the bill, Rep. Smith pointed out that “when women receive proper prenatal care, they are less likely to die in childbirth,” adding that the final form of the resolution “does not endorse – in any way whatsoever – the cruel ideology that pits women against babies by suggesting abortion as a means of combating maternal mortality.”