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Pro-Abortion UN Petition Falters; Pro-Life Initiative Numbers Surging

By Samantha Singson
       
NEW YORK October 9, 2008 (C-FAM) - A month after the campaign was first reported in the Friday Fax, pro-abortion group Marie Stopes International has removed the ticker keeping track of names for their web-campaign calling for “Global Safe Abortion.”

The Friday Fax reported last month that after a year of campaigning the Marie Stopes abortion petition had garnered fewer than 600 signers. A month later, a count of campaign signatures reveals that only 50 more people have added their signatures to the Marie Stopes petition.

Conversely, a pro-life initiative that began less than two weeks ago as a counterpoint to the Marie Stopes campaign has yielded more than 26,000 signatures.  The “International Call for the Rights and Dignity of the Human Person and the Family,” launched by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), has generated a massive response from concerned pro-lifers from around the globe.

The Marie Stopes campaign was launched at the International Global Safe Abortion Conference last October in London, an event held in conjunction with the Women Deliver conference, which was sponsored by various United Nations agencies including UNICEF. Both the conference and the campaign seek to bolster international commitment to abortion and call “for women’s access to legal, safe abortion to be recognized as a fundamental human right.”

The Marie Stopes call to action says that it is “intolerable” that restrictive laws, lack of resources and “politically and ideologically-motivated interference” remain obstacles for women to access “contraceptive and abortion technologies to save women’s lives.”

Campaign organizers plan to continue to collect signatures online and will seek institutional endorsement of the safe abortion call to action.  They hope the call to action will be used at the international level as a tool to influence policy and generate funding to tackle the issue of unsafe abortion.

The C-FAM petition urges UN member states to interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to give proper consideration to the right to life and the family.

The petition stresses that “the right to life of every human being, from conception to natural death, each child having the right to be conceived, born and educated within the family, based on marriage between a woman and a man, the family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”  The petition also stresses the right of parents to choose how their children should be educated.

The petition is being circulated globally in French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch and Slovenian. The C-FAM campaign will run until the end of November and partner organizations from around globe will be running similar campaigns to bolster support for the right to life and family at the international level.

Both Marie Stopes and C-FAM plan to present their petitions to the UN community on December 10, when the UN commemorates the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational international human rights document.

C-FAM President Austin Ruse said, "We have known all along that support for radical abortion rights is supported mostly by elites. Ask everyday citizens around the world about abortion, and they are against it." 

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