Pro-abortion feminists are already squawking at the drubbing they have taken at the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development.
Though the official conference begins today, it is merely a circus added onto the months-long inter-government negotiations to produce what turned out to be a 283-point, 80-page outcome document. Negotiations on that monster ended yesterday, and have been a clean sweep for pro-life advocates.
For more than year abortion advocates located at the U.N. Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and various abortion promoting governments in Europe have tried to load up the document with the term “reproductive rights” and “population dynamics,” both of which are code words for what many consider objectionable public policy.
Radical feminists are saying this was the work of the un-holy alliance of the Vatican, Syria, and Egypt. But that’s not the complete story. The countries that banded together included leftist Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Russia.
#more#Nicaragua was perhaps the most vocal in opposition to this troubling language. Their delegate told the assembly that governments should cease to “shadowbox around the term ‘reproductive rights’ which every country knows is a code at the U.N. for abortion.” The delegate pointed out it was Norway and Iceland who were undermining the broad consensus to keep the term out.
Zonibel Woods took to the Ted Turner–funded website RH Reality Check to complain, “From the start of the negotiations, gender equality and women’s human rights, including reproductive rights, have continuously been challenged by a few governments, claiming that [these] had “nothing to do with sustainable development.” She claimed the governments had traded away women’s rights for what the Vatican wanted.
Such a victory is rare on this issue at the U.N. Woody Allen said relationships are like sharks: They have to keep moving forward or they die. The same could be said for U.N. language. This new document represents a major setback for the abortion regime at the U.N.
Some may wonder what reproductive rights have to do with development. According to Zonibel Woods, “If a woman cannot decide if and when to have children . . . it is challenging to contribute to sustainable solutions for the planet.”
All told, these defeats for the radicals were a good day for the rest of us.
— Austin Ruse is president of C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute).