May 22, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – As bolder pro-life laws continue to be enacted across the United States, the United Nations office tasked with upholding human rights around the globe is speaking out against the new protections for preborn humans.
Following numerous states that have passed bans on abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, Alabama and Georgia recently signed new laws that ban the vast majority of abortions. Supporters hope the wave of more aggressive pro-life laws will provoke enough legal challenges to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court and overturn Roe v. Wade, enabling abortion to be directly banned in any state.
On Tuesday, UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told Reuters that the international body is “very concerned” by the measures sweeping across the U.S., and is “calling on the United States and all other countries to ensure that women have access to safe abortions,” keeping abortion legal “at an absolute minimum” of rape, incest, or fetal-anomaly cases. (The Georgia law makes several exceptions; Alabama’s ban and most heartbeat laws only make exceptions for physical threats to a mother.)
Shamdasani falsely accused the laws of “imposing criminal penalties on the women themselves,” declared abortion bans “inherently discriminatory,” and claimed that banning abortion accomplishes nothing but “jeopardizing the life, health and safety of the women concerned.”
Institute for Family Studies research fellow Lyman Stone addressed the subject of abortion bans’ effectiveness at length Monday at The Federalist, examining data from U.S. states, Poland, South Korea, and Austria to confirm that laws restricting abortions do meaningfully reduce the number that occur.
In 2012, Americans United for Life tackled the common claim that lack of abortion “access” endangers women by showing that, as an example, illegal abortions represented a small percentage of maternal deaths in Latin America. It also noted that the World Health Organization has admitted that “hospital structure” was the “most important variable” to determining maternal deaths. “The availability of essential obstetric care, active emergencies and experts” must be addressed to save women’s lives, AUL concluded, not the availability of abortion.
The UN’s rebuke of Americans’ abortion decisions is the latest manifestation of the international body’s pro-abortion leanings. Last fall, the UN Human Rights Commission called on governments around the world to lift their restrictions on abortion in the name of “fundamental rights” and “gender equality.”
The Trump administration has consistently worked to defend life and oppose abortion at the UN, from resisting pro-abortion agenda items and resolution language to affirming that abortion isn’t a human right and promoting abstinence education.