Amnesty International and Abortion Promotion

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - August 31, 2007

The most notorious violations of human rights often occur by those who purport to uphold human rights.

The way they try to get away with these crimes is arbitrarily to classify the human beings whose rights they wish to violate outside of the group of human beings whose rights need to be protected.

We saw this with our Founding Fathers and those who upheld apartheid in South Africa: they simply wrote blacks outside the category of full human beings. We witnessed it with the Nazis, who taught that Aryans were the real human beings and Jews closer to vermin needing to be exterminated. We watched it with Stalin, who regarded the tens of millions he starved to death merely as "statistics." We note it today with Al-Qaeda, who go after innocent children claiming that these civilians are aggressive war combatants who need to be killed in self-defense. We observe it in China, where prisoners are deemed to have given up their rights and therefore can be licitly vivisected and killed in order to profit from their organs. We behold it in the Netherlands, where those who are incapable of work through old age or handicaps are no longer considered to have human dignity and are involuntarily euthanized like sick pets. And nowhere is this seen more frequently than in the grisly practice of abortion, when human beings at the same age of existence we once were are given less protection than pit bulls in Virginia.

The examples can be multiplied, but the principle is the same: such violators claim they support human rights, but merely do not support the claims of some to be human. Even if they begrudgingly are forced to admit, biologically, that their victims are not orangutans or members of other species, these violators retort by citing man-made laws stipulating that the victims are not human persons, and therefore are undeserving of rights. The only logical way to defend against this — in other words, to say that the Nazis were wrong— is to affirm that human rights flow, not from concession by those in power on whomever they please, but from a human being's innate human dignity.

This is why the recent decision of the leadership of Amnesty International to begin promoting a "right" to abortion is so disturbing and self-defeating, because by it, Amnesty International is undermining the very foundation of its defense of human rights.

Since it came into existence through the work of the English Catholic convert Peter Benenson in 1981, Amnesty International has been one of the foremost defenders of human rights in the world. Now with 1.8 million members, Amnesty International has sought to be a voice for the voiceless, fighting to free prisoners of conscience under totalitarian regimes, to stop torture, to abolish the death penalty, to end violence against minorities and women and so many other just causes. It has persistently shone a strong international light on human rights abuses and has achieved much success.

With respect to the issue of abortion, Amnesty International had adopted a policy of neutrality. Its members were divided between some who looked at abortion as a right and others who viewed it as the greatest violation of human rights. The organization simply asked all members to focus on what united them and work to eliminate those abuses which all members in unison denounced.

Earlier this month, however, Amnesty International's leadership council decided to abandon neutrality and begin to promote a right to abortion. Their public rationale is that they see no other way to protect the human rights of women raped in places like Darfur or incest victims in patriarchal cultures. They say that they are not intending to promote a universal right to abortion, but anyone who has followed the history of abortion access knows that once abortion is seen to be a right in some circumstances it quickly begins to be viewed as a right in any circumstance.

Reaction from Catholic leaders has been strong and immediate. The U.S. Bishops' Conference, in a statement last week, said, "This basic policy change undermines Amnesty's longstanding moral credibility and unnecessarily diverts its mission. In promoting abortion, Amnesty divides its own members (many of whom are Catholics and others who defend the rights of unborn children) and jeopardizes its support by people in many nations, cultures and religions who share a consistent commitment to all human rights.

"To some," the bishops continue, "the action of Amnesty International may appear to be a compassionate response to women in difficult situations of pregnancy, but this is a false compassion. True commitment to women's rights puts us in solidarity with women and their unborn children. It does not pit one against the other but calls us to advocate on behalf of both.

The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, was equally as clear. "Violence cannot be answered by further violence, murder with murder... for even if the child is unborn it is still a human person... It has a right to dignity as a human being. We can never destroy life. We must always save life even if it is the fruit of violence."

The simple truth is that a rape or incest tragically cannot be undone. Abortion does not liberate a victim from the violation of her human rights and all the pain associated with it, but turns her into a perpetrator of a second violation of human rights that is even worse than the first: Abortion imposes the convictions of the powerful upon the weak to the point of death.

Amnesty International, and all people of good will, should focus their great resources on the prevention of rape and incest and the cultural factors that promote them rather than try to convince the world that two wrongs make a right, or that a stronger and older human being has a human right to violate the essential human dignity of one who is even more vulnerable.

Many Catholics, including priests and bishops, have already begun to resign from Amnesty International as a result of the decision of the leadership council. Catholic faithful in the Diocese of Fall River should consider doing the same.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.