Editor’s note. This appeared at the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Pro-abortion NGOs are petitioning UN officials to mark September 28 as International Safe Abortion Day. The day has been used by pro-abortion activists to protest pro-life laws and stage events promoting abortion since 1990 but now the NGOs are seeking official recognition to aid their agenda.
A letter will be sent on July 4 to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and to the heads of UN agencies stating, “We, the undersigned, are writing to support the proposal of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion that you declare 28 September, International Safe Abortion Day, an official international UN Day.”
The letter cites calls by select treaty monitoring bodies, notorious for distorting treaties and instructing countries to overturn pro-life laws, as a reason for officially recognizing a day for abortion:
In the past 5-10 years, a growing number of UN human rights bodies– including CEDAW [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women] , the Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on Civil and Political Rights, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, the UN Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and practice (UN Working Group), and the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR]–have called for abortion to be made safe and on a growing list of grounds, also legal. In January 2016, ACHPR called for the decriminalisation of abortion across Africa and in April 2016 the UN Working Group also called on all States to “discontinue the use of criminal law to punish woman for ending a pregnancy”.
…The letter ends,
“We therefore call on you, as UN agencies whose work touches on women’s health and rights in so many ways, to send a strong signal to the international community and to all our governments, with a simple but highly symbolic statement of support for safe abortion, by agreeing to make International Safe Abortion Day, 28 September, an official UN day.”
PNCI notes that the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action recognized that laws on abortion are to be determined “according to the national legislative process,” a fact that pro-abortion activists choose to ignore.