Lobby
27 October 2009
Dear supporter,
On 29 September http://is.gd/4Eo0x we asked you to lobby the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), which was due to debate a radical pro-abortion report http://is.gd/3MQxB authored by Christine McCafferty, the veteran anti-life British MP. The vote was postponed, thanks to your efforts. Further amendments to the report will now be considered by the assembly's Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee, which is chaired by Mrs McCafferty, at a meeting in Paris on 13 November. Many pro-life amendments have been tabled by Luca Volonte, an Italian parliamentarian. Please email the committee-members http://is.gd/4Enzd to urge them to support Mr Volonte's amendments (specifically amendments 10 to 15, 17 & 18, and 20 to 29), and to vote against the report as a whole if the committee rejects the amendments. The title of the report is "Fifteen years since the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action".
Also, Christine McCafferty is now proposing a second report entitled "Women's access to lawful medical care: the problem of unregulated use of conscientious objection". This second report is being promoted by the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion law firm, and Christian Fiala, Austria's most notorious abortion doctor. The report's aim is to attack doctors who refuse to provide or refer women for abortions. In your email to the committee-members about McCafferty's first report (mentioned above), please also urge them to reject Mrs McCafferty's second report too.
Please
Points from the ECLJ's briefing on Mrs McCafferty's first report:
- "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."