Lobby

29 September 2009

Dear supporter,

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) http://is.gd/3MQuR will debate this Friday (2 October) a radical pro-abortion report http://is.gd/3MQxB promoted by Christine McCafferty, the veteran anti-life British MP. Please help defend Europeans, born and unborn, against the report. Please contact your country's representatives in the assembly http://is.gd/3MQpw to urge them to reject the report.

Please

• send one separate email per representative
• head each message with Dear [insert Mr, Mrs, etc] [insert surname]
• draw on the points below from a briefing http://is.gd/3MRnx by the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) http://is.gd/3MRmg
• remember to copy any replies you receive to political@spuc.org.uk

UK citizens should:

• visit the list of UK representatives http://is.gd/3MRvf and
• email as many of them as possible. All the UK representatives can be emailed via the same email address coepa.del@parliament.uk

Points from the ECLJ's briefing:

• "The ECLJ is particularly concerned about the [report's] underlying promotion of abortion as a means of family planning and population control."
• "The Council of Europe has no authority or competency to promote abortion."
• "[T]he [report is] based upon unsupportable concerns regarding the need for greater population control in developing countries."
• "Promoting abortion violates the core values upon which the Council of Europe was built by greatly offending the protection of human life and dignity, and respect for national sovereignty."
• "International law does not provide a so called 'right' to abortion ... Only the right to life is recognized."
• "The European Convention on Human Rights explicitly contains a provision guaranteeing the right to life. The Parliamentary Assembly cannot infer from the Convention that the right to life does not extend to the unborn, and cannot lower the degree of protection afforded by the State to human life."
• "Attacking the legitimacy of any country's abortion laws is not within the competency of the Council of Europe."
• "The Explanatory Memorandum's recommendations are premised in large part on unfounded assertions about the need for population control and advance the cause of the neomalthusianism philosophy."
• "[I]improving agricultural technology has allowed food production to more than keep pace with population growth."
• "Indeed, in 1995, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that by fully employing present agricultural technology, the world could feed 30 to 35 billion people."
• "Malthus's theories eventually gave rise to the eugenics movement of the late 19th and 20th Centuries that divided human beings into 'superior' and 'inferior' races and called for the segregation or elimination of the 'inferior' races."
• "[T]he population control movement has also been used as an instrument of imperialism against less-developed countries."
• "The money to be spent on population control in less developed countries can be better spent on basic health care needs and economic development in those countries."
• "[T]he availability of abortion as a component of population control programs coupled with the widespread availability of technology that allows parents to learn the sex of their unborn child has led to a disproportionate number of abortions of unborn girls."