NEW YORK, November 22, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — A UN group of worldwide experts on women’s rights believes Canada needs more access to abortion and birth control, though one in five pregnancies already ends in abortion and steady immigration is needed to sustain the current population.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has faulted Canada for not providing equal access to abortion across all Canadian provinces.
The committee cited a regulation it created in 1999 to support the critical “observation.” The CEDAW treaty (of which Canada is a signator) mentions no right to abortion, though the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child, which Canada also signed, does acknowledge the rights of the unborn.
According to CEDAW’s recently released report on how Canada is meeting its treaty obligations, “The Committee notes the measures taken to facilitate access to legal abortion services. It remains concerned, however, at disparities in access to such services and to affordable contraceptives.”
41. In line with its general recommendation No. 24 (1999) on women and health, the Committee recommends that the State party: (a) Ensure access to legal abortion services in all provinces and territories; (b) Ensure that invocation of conscientious objection by physicians does not impede women’s access to legal abortion services; (c) Make affordable contraceptives accessible and available to all women and girls, in particular those living in poverty and/or in remote areas.”
Yet according to UN watcher Rebecca Oas of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM): “There is nothing in the CEDAW treaty of 1979 to support this call for easier abortion. … There is no mention of abortion at all, not even a euphemism for abortion.”
Though abortion is far from the main preoccupation of CEDAW’s report on Canada, Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights insists in a news release that “central to Canada’s review was the issue of the accessibility, affordability, acceptability and quality of sexual and reproductive health services. The UN Committee expressed grave concern regarding continued disparities in access to abortion in Canada.”
In fact, the central concerns for the CEDAW experts were a lack of progress on gender equality and violence against indigenous women, both of which it called for the Canadian government to report on in two years instead of the customary four.
No other issue, least of all abortion and contraception, received such prioritization in the concluding remarks. The word “grave” never appears in the report itself. As for its “concern” about abortion access, it joins a list of 31 “concerns” about everything from “The lack of clear and coherent coordination and management of gender mainstreaming efforts between the federal and the provincial/territorial level,” to the failure of provincial legal systems to make CEDAW enforceable in courts.
And though Action Canada claims that “People in Canada also lack access to the World Health Organization’s gold-standard drug for medical abortion, Mifegymiso,” because of Health Canada restrictions in its use, CEDAW’s report makes no mention of the drug in its concluding remarks.
Perhaps the CEDAW committee soft-peddles abortion issues in its report because the treaty makes no mention of it. But why does it mention it at all? C-FAM’s Oas says the CEDAW committee is behaving like many unelected UN bodies do and attempting to push forward its own agenda, amplifying the treaties they created to advance with internally-generated regulations and motions pushing a radical ideology.
The member countries say they are “exceeding their mandate. Their recommendations are not binding,” Oas told LifeSiteNews. But these recommendations do provide local advocacy organizations such as Action Canada the political ammunition to manipulate public opinion and political leaders who still hold the United Nations in high regard.
C-FAM director Austin Ruse agrees. “The committee has no authority to get governments to do anything. They can comment, that is all. They have largely discredited themselves in recent years by going far beyond their mandate in actually rewriting hard law treaties to include things ‘States Parties’ never agreed to.”
Matthew Wojciechowski of the Campaign Life Coalition dismisses CEDAW as “rabidly pro-abortion committee who tries to impose their ideology on nations around the world.” He too noted that Canada does not have to act on them and added, “In fact, no UN document has every defined abortion as a human right. This is just another deceitful ploy by Action Canada to make Canadians think that we should do everything the UN tells us to.”
Wojciechowski questions why Action Canada, formed from the merger of Planned Parenthood Canada with two other abortion groups, has charity status “when their main work is political lobbying and advocacy.”
Another Canadian UN watcher, retired Vancouver Island Lutheran pastor Colin Liske, has been researching the abortion issue in the UN context. “It seems ironic that a UN human rights body would condemn Canada regarding the inadequacy of abortion services when the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Canada is a signatory as of 1990, specifically says near the beginning, ‘the child by reason of his physical and mental immaturity needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth,’” Liske observed. “It also seems odd that we virtually never hear about this part of the Convention from the mainstream news media.”
RELATED
United Nations Steps up Pressure on Northern Ireland to Permit Abortions
UN blasts Hungary for 'gender discrimination' over traditional views