Secret Memos Reveal Worldwide Pro-Abortion Legal Strategy
CFAM Friday Fax, 5,
December, 2003.
Vol. 6, No. 50
(Reproduced with permission)
Internal Memos
The Friday Fax has acquired a number of
internal memos produced by the Center for
Reproductive Rights (CRR) that map out CRR's
multi-year strategy for establishing binding and
enforceable international reproductive rights
laws, most notably girls' and women's right to
state-financed abortion on demand. The memos
were written to summarize the conclusions of
strategic planning meetings held by CRR in late
October, and they explain in detail how the
Center, along with its many pro-abortion allies
throughout the world, plans to expand
international laws well beyond their current
scope and to impose these new laws worldwide,
even upon individual nations that do not
explicitly assent to the changes.
The memos appear to confirm long-standing fears
of some legal scholars that international
negotiations on human rights laws are no longer
conducted in good faith, and that national
sovereignty is jeopardized by such negotiations.
In the memos, CRR repeatedly states that its
"overarching goal is to ensure that governments
worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of
an understanding that they are bound to do so."
These rights would include the broadest possible
access to abortion, and the establishment of
abortion as an internationally recognized human
right, but they are not limited to abortion. CRR
also speaks of the international community's
need to recognize the "inalienable nature" of
what it calls "sexual rights."
These rights will in turn require new laws
that "explicitly address the legal and social
subordination women face within their families,
marriages, communities and societies." They will
also require the establishment of "reproductive
autonomy" for girls, which CRR describes as
access to all reproductive information and
services, including abortion, without parental
notification or consent.
CRR hopes to achieve these goals through a
multi-pronged strategy. First, CRR will work to
radically expand the interpretations of
already-accepted international rights, what CRR
calls "hard norms," into vehicles for its
reproductive rights agenda. Thus, CRR claims to
have found, or "grounded," a right to abortion
in the right to life, the right to health, even
the right to enjoy scientific progress. CRR
favors this approach because "there is a stealth
quality to the work: we are achieving
incremental recognition of values without a huge
amount of scrutiny from the opposition."
Second, CRR hopes to create new customary
international laws, what it calls "soft norms,"
that explicitly mention abortion and sexual
autonomy. According to CRR, if soft norms are
repeated often enough, they may become hard
norms, and therefore binding on nations. Soft
norms accumulate in a host of international and
regional settings, including through the
European Court of Human Rights and UN compliance
committees.
Finally, CRR seeks a means to impose these new
international laws on recalcitrant nations.
Thus, CRR will be "supporting efforts to
strengthen existing enforcement mechanisms, such
as the campaign for the International Criminal
Court and the Optional Protocol to the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women."
The Friday Fax is reported and written by
Douglas Sylva, C-FAM Vice President.
Copyright - C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human
Rights Institute). Permission granted for
unlimited use. Credit required.
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