"Stealth" Campaign Exposed: Abortion Group Admits Tactics are on the Edge     6/29/2004
By Wendy Wright

Aims to pressure countries at U.N. conference to drop all abortion restrictions

Internal memos from a radical abortion-litigation group reveal the tactics underway this week at a U.N. conference in Puerto Rico. The goal? To pressure countries to drop any restrictions on abortion, even for adolescents.

This week's meeting is a follow-up to one last March in Santiago, Chile. The United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) is conducting a 10-year review of how countries are implementing the Cairo Program of Action. The controversial United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which lost U.S. funding because it assists China's forced population-control program, hosts the meetings.

The memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) admit: "[T]here is a stealth quality to our work: We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus."

Abortion and "adolescents' access to reproductive health care" are CRR's top priorities.

Someone leaked the memos to C-FAM, a pro-life group with which CWA works closely to inform and educate delegates at the United Nations. Pro-life stalwart Rep. Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) placed the memos in the Congressional Record, stating, "It is critical that both the American and foreign publics are made aware of these documents because they shed new light on the schemes of those who want to promote abortion here and abroad. It is especially important that policy makers know, and more fully understand, the deceptive practices being employed by the abortion lobby."

The CRR memos reveal a strategy "to ensure that governments worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of an understanding that they are legally bound to do so." CRR defines "reproductive rights" as including unlimited access to abortion and contraceptives.

The memo states, "[Abortion] advocates have to look for opportunities - such as international conferences and meetings of treaty-monitoring bodies and other U.N. human rights bodies - to put norms relating to reproductive rights on the international agenda."

In Santiago, a declaration produced by the delegates surpassed even the Cairo blueprint by calling for reproductive rights for adolescents, with no age restrictions or parental involvement. An additional meeting in Mexico City on women's rights, held earlier this month, introduced a term never before used in U.N. documents. "Sexual rights" could mean nearly anything that a clever lawyer or policy maker wants it to mean.

CRR plans to create international legal norms to force countries to accept abortion on demand. This strategy does not follow the democratic process. Instead, pro-abortion groups impose it upon countries through judges' misinterpretations of treaties and U.N. documents (in national and international courts) or having phrases such as "reproductive rights" repeated in international documents. Then these groups tell countries they are required to pass legislation to comply with the U.N. agreements. Some delegates agree to these phrases with no understanding of the abortion lobby's true intentions.

CRR describes itself as the pre-eminent abortion-litigation team built by "its determination to push the envelope with legal theories that were sometimes on the edge." At ECLAC, CRR has manipulated other countries to join it on the edge--and then to push them off the cliff.

CWA and other pro-life advocates are diligently working with delegations at ECLAC to slow - and, through prayer, turn around - the rush to the edge. Please uphold in prayer our efforts in Puerto Rico this week.

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