DUBLIN, November 14, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Only a few months following the passage of Ireland’s first-ever law allowing direct abortions, one of the world’s wealthiest and most aggressive abortion lobby groups has lodged a complaint at the UN to try to force open the existing limitations.
The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), notorious for its work in South America and elsewhere to use the courts to force abortion legislation, has chosen three Irish women who had abortions in the UK to take the case to the UN Human Rights Committee.
CRR was also one of the organizations backing the A,B and C case at the European Court of Human Rights that was used by the Irish government as a pretext for legalizing abortion.
The complaint claims that the refusal of the Irish state to allow the abortion of disabled babies is a violation of the “right” to abortion, although no such right exists in international law. The complaint is likely to be heard next week, The Journal reports.
CRR and the women, who have formed a group called Terminations for Medical Reasons (TFMR), had unsuccessfully tried to have fetal disability included in the country’s recently passed abortion law.
“This is yet another example of global and very well financed abortion lobbyists using their massive resources to batter Ireland’s pro-life ethos,” Niamh Uí Bhriain, the head of the Life Institute, told LifeSiteNews.com.
She described CRR as “massively wealthy” international abortion lobbyists, saying, “The CRR describe themselves as human rights lobbyists, but they are actually calculating and fanatical abortion campaigners who want to see abortion without restriction legalized in every country in the world.”
They are “sticking their noses into the business of the Irish people, and trying to overturn our sovereign right to protect mothers and babies from abortion”.
In April it was revealed that supporters of the law understood that allowing abortion in cases of a woman threatening suicide was to be only the beginning.
Aodhan O’Riordain, a Labour Party TD said that legislating for abortion in cases of suicidal intention is only a wedge to force open the door to abortion on demand. O’Riordain was quoted by the Irish Independent saying the current law is just “a starting point.”
“Once you get that,” he said, “then you can move.”
He added that deceiving the public on the government’s real intentions is part of the plan. “Of course if I’m on the radio and somebody says to me, ‘It’s a starting point for abortion on demand,’ I’m gonna say, ‘No, of course it isn’t – it is what it is.’”
These admissions were backed up by Anne Ferris, a Labour TD for Wicklow who said, “We will legislate certainly for what the European Court has told us to and then we can go further than that…we get the first part done, and then we will go on to the next bit.”
Uí Bhriain pointed out that CRR had revenues in 2010 of $18 million (U.S.) and maintains offices around the world, with funding coming from wealthy U.S. foundations and companies such as Google and Bank of America.
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“We have this richly ironic situation where left-wing activists and politicians in Ireland are welcoming foreign interference from the business-funded abortion lobbyists in the U.S.,” she said. But the use of international lobbyists, she said, is an indication of their lack of local support in Ireland.
Moreover, Ireland’s statistics on fetal abnormalities and abortion figures from the UK show that using them to institute eugenic abortion is another political red herring. Some abortion-promoters have claimed to Irish media that there are 1,500 cases of serious illness or disability in unborn children annually, and 80 percent of these “end in abortion in Britain.”
But records released by the UK’s Department of Health show that the real numbers of unborn children diagnosed with serious or fatal illness is closer to 700 a year. Of these, more than 90 percent of the families refused abortion.
Figures showed that in 2011 a total of 51 abortions were carried out on Irish women for reasons of disability – including non-terminal conditions like Down Syndrome and Spina Bifida.
In its work throughout the world, CRR has particularly focused on targeting Catholic-majority countries to use litigation to force expansion of abortion legislation.
In 2011, the group announced the creation of a special Latin America office whose mandate would be “to build a more powerful and transnational reproductive rights movement” through the use of complaints like that of the three Irish women to overturn restrictive laws.
This technique of using individuals to bring complaints to national courts and bodies like the UN and European Court of Human Rights, (ECHR) bodies known for their strong sympathies towards the abortionist agenda, has proven highly effective in overturning laws in countries like Poland, Spain, and Portugal.
In 2011, the ECHR issued such a ruling against Poland brought by the Federation for Women and Family Planning, CRR and a collection of international abortion lobbyists.
In that case – one of hundreds like it brought around the world – the court ruled that the Polish government had not provided the woman with a possibility to exercise her right to receive information about abortion.
At the time, Poland was one of the last three EU member states, with Malta and the Republic of Ireland, that retained significant legal restrictions on abortion. At the moment, CRR is active in litigation and various campaigns in over 50 countries worldwide.