Sunday, March 06, 2005

ABORTION CORRECTNESS

Excerpt from an article by Janice Shaw Crouse. Noting the Orwellian use of "choice" to mean its opposite

The United States delegation is continuing to frustrate radical feminists by resisting the Far Left agenda that the United Nations has been aggressively promoting worldwide since the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975. The United States has introduced a statement for the working draft of the Beijing +10 Declaration that is causing an uproar. The U.S. asks delegates to "reaffirm that [the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (PFA)] do not create any new international human rights and that they do not include the right to abortion."

Why is this statement so controversial? Imagine 8,000 people crowding into the U.N.'s New York headquarters, and at least 7,000 of them are pro-abortion. Support is overwhelming for a statement coming out of the late Bella Abzug's organization, the Women's Economic Development Organization (WEDO): "Beijing's been betrayed!" Indeed, feelings about abortion run so strong that there are rumors that, once again, there's a risk of a CSW ending without consensus. (The first and only time a CSW ended without consensus was in 2003 when the conference could not agree with the U.S. position that prostitution is inherently harmful to women. President Bush appointed me as a U.S. delegate that year when we fought the radicals to a standstill.)

The Left has used the Beijing outcome documents -- which are technically "non-binding agreements" -- to promote abortion around the world. Radical feminists have blatantly distorted the intent and reality of the Beijing PFA to say that a woman's "right" to an abortion is a basic human right, as delineated in Beijing, the Cairo +5 conference and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). ....

Thus, even though nobody voted on the "law" and obfuscation surrounds the process of establishing the so-called "right" in individual nations, all member nations are expected to adhere to a policy that has become binding simply because some special interest group rammed language into some obscure treaty at the United Nations.

Those same special interest groups are also using the U.S.'s principled stands as a means of stirring up international anger against our country. The goal is to use opposition to the United States' pro-life position in order to legalize abortion around the world. Not only is this goal abhorrent, it is even more despicable (if possible) because it denies freedom of choice.

The International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC) has published a manual advocating the use of language in international U.N. documents to establish the right to an abortion - even though the cited documents do not explicitly assert it. It is ironic that these despots who seek to force nations to accept their agenda mask their intent under the mantra of "choice." .....

Sadly, while these privileged few scheme at the United Nations for so-called "women's rights," women around the world are left needing basic health care, safe water, decent housing, personal safety, educational and economic opportunity, political empowerment and freedom.



The Left's 'Divine Right' to tell others what to do

"While the media have been focusing on the flap at Harvard growing out of its president's statement about the reasons for the under-representation of women in the sciences, a much worse and more revealing scandal has unfolded at the University of Seattle, where a student mob prevented a military recruiter from meeting with those students who wanted to meet with him.

At first, the university president said that the student rioters should apologize. But the storm this created forced the typical academic administrator's back-down under pressure.

One of the student rioters explained that she didn't want anyone to be sent overseas to be killed. Apparently it never occurred to her that what she wanted was not automatically to be imposed on other people, with or without mob violence.

Back in the days of the divine rights of kings, it might be understandable why a given monarch might think that what he wanted was all that mattered. But, in an age of democracy, how can millions of people live together if each one asserts a divine right to impose his or her will on others?

Surely our educational system has failed if it has not taught something so basic in logic or morality. But too many of our schools and colleges have been so busy pushing particular forms of political correctness that they have not bothered to explain why other views by other people cannot be ignored intellectually or disregarded politically.....

The time is long overdue for our media and our educational institutions to start presenting both sides of issues -- and for our schools and colleges to start teaching students how to think, instead of telling them what to think".

More here

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