Amnesty International has been under fire for years for its pro-abortion positions and now the venerable human rights group is launching a new global effort to push abortion on a worldwide scale.
“The My Body My Rights campaign encourages young people around the world to know and demand their right to make decisions about their health, body, sexuality and reproduction without state control, fear, coercion or discrimination. It also seeks to remind world leaders of their obligations to take positive action, including through access to health services,” the group says.
Sadly, portions of the My Body My Rights campaign concern legitimate human rights issues on which no one on the pro-life or pro-abortion side of the abortion debate would disagree. It tackles problems like how Nepalese girls are forced to marry as children and more than half a million women suffer from a debilitating condition known as uterine prolapse, or fallen womb, as a result of continuous pregnancy and hard labour. The campaign also highlights how girls are forced to marry their rapists in the Maghreb.
Unfortunately, these legitimate human rights abuses are wrapped up in Amnesty International’s push for abortion — starting with pro-life countries like Ireland and El Salvador, where abortion is prohibited except in very rare circumstances. An Amnesty spokeswoman clearly mixes abortion and issues that would be appropriate for AI to undertake.
“It is unbelievable that in the twenty-first century some countries are condoning child marriage and marital rape while others are outlawing abortion, sex outside marriage and same-sex sexual activity – even punishable by death,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
Amnesty talks about nations it considers problematic — two of which have real human rights abuses and two of which protect the human rights of unborn children:
- In Morocco, 16-year-old Amina killed herself after being forced to marry the man who raped her. At the time, Moroccan law allowed her attacker to escape prosecution for his crime if he married her.
- In Burkina Faso talking openly about sex is taboo. Contraception is not widely available and unplanned pregnancy is widespread. Hassatou was just 13 when she became pregnant. She had no idea that sex would lead to childbirth. After the baby was born, her family threw them out onto the streets.
- In El Salvador abortion is illegal, even in cases of rape or when a woman or girl’s life or health is at risk, and violence against women and girls remains widespread.
- In Ireland, women and girls face up to 14 years in prison for having an abortion other than when their life is at risk.
One leading international pro-life activist says Amnesty International has become Abortion International.
The reason why Amnesty International should not be supported is that it no longer is the organization it used to be.
True, in its outward communication the organization still uses the imagery of its earlier days: political dissidents and prisoners of conscience sitting behind barbed wire, exposed to torture, humiliation, forced labour, starvation, the death penalty, etc., all of them unknown to, or forgotten by, the free world. By donating to Amnesty International, you are led to believe, you could help drawing worldwide attention to the fate of these prisoners of conscience, thus exerting political pressure on their thugs and torturers, and, ultimately, contribute to saving their lives and getting them released.
Well, this is what Amnesty may have done in the past, but it is not what they are doing today. The images of “prisoners of conscience” behind barbed wire are nothing but a smoke screen, helping to convince people like you to donate and – more important – to preserve the organization’s positive public image and credibility. In a certain sense, one might say that Amnesty is nowadays trying to take a free-ride, exploiting the credibility of true human rights heroes such as Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Andrey Sakharov, and others.
It is true that decades ago, Amnesty did a lot to help these dissidents, and this is why the organization is today still believed to be a leading human rights NGO. But in reality, the Amnesty’s focus has shifted. It has given up its initial focus on prisoners of conscience; instead it is now promoting a so-called “holistic” view of human rights that squares well with the controversial social agenda of the UN and its specialized agencies. The cornerstone of this new agenda are so-called “sexual and reproductive rights”, which in the UN newspeak is a code word for promoting abortion, artificial conception, homosexuality, homosexual “parenting”, etc.
In other words, Amnesty is now part of the abortionisttlobby, and occasional campaigns in favour of political prisoners only serve the purpose of polishing the organization’s nimbus.
