Amnesty International Gives Amnesty to Pro-Choice
| By Kay Steiger - Aug 20th, 2007 at 3:00 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
The BBC reports that Amnesty International, which had maintained a neutral stance on abortion, now says they want "to ensure women have access to health care when complications arise from abortion and to defend women's access to abortion, within reasonable gestational limits, when their health or human rights are in danger."
This is a pretty conservative endorsement, if you ask me, but given the fact that AI does a lot of work in countries with a heavy Catholic populations. I'm not sure how they determine what a "reasonable gestational limit" is, but it seems like they're recognizing that by being neutral they were actually serving an injustice.
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Yes, this is still a conservative standpoint from the perspective of the Pro-Choice community, but I hope it will highlight an area of abortion debate and horror that most anti-choice activists aren't forced to take a stand on often enough.
From the extreme anti-choice perspective, a woman or hundreds who are raped as a tactic of genocide should be forced to bear the children of that intentional genetic, emotional, and physical assault. And if they choose to end their pregnancies, they should be fined, imprisoned, or killed, depending on the country. To force women to bear and then raise the children of men who sought to replace their people genetically, probably murdering their husbands, sons, and daughters in the process, is to me, complicity in organized genocide. But, maybe that's what God wants, right?
Moving abortion into the realm of disciplined human rights discourse is a scary thing for traditional human rights activists because it is divisive and so legally murky. However, I think Amnesty's decision (made, very carefully, after years of debate and research among staff and members) is a brave one, and while they will lose members (they lost thousands when they decided to take an absolute stance against the death penalty - who'd have thought?), I think it will benefit the pro-choice community hugely in the long run. Not because AI will ever take a completely pro-abortion stance, but because AI's members, many many many of whom are deeply religious, will have to contextualize their understanding of abortion within the HR framework in a new way.
Folks to watch out for who are co-opting traditional (meaning United Nations and Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Genocide Convention) human rights language to promote their extreme agendas:
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