Amnesty International’s War on Life

Particularly after our Maternal Health lecture and hearing the horror stories about life and motherhood in the Third World, I find it more and more important to look out at the world and find organisations that are genuinely doing good for the world at large, organisations that take life seriously and try to help even the poorest and most downtrodden in the world. This is why I was so disappointed reading this article. Amnesty International, the hugely influential non-profit humanitarian charity, has gone a step further in its war on life. This is not exactly new news – Amnesty came out in 2004 for abortion – but in the last week it has been using all of its influence to send demands to Third World countries that they rid themselves of all abortion laws and make the process more accessible to women. It has been doing this by sending out petitions to the governments of Peru and Indonesia demanding that they strike down their already comparatively liberal abortion laws. All this having happened since last week! This is part of a long tradition which has been attempted throughout the Third World. Pressuring countries into institutionalizing the unborn as property rather than human beings.
Needless to say I am appalled at the stance of Amnesty International. How can an organisation who’s motto is “to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.” be so blind to the fact that the unborn are, in fact, some of the individuals that most need to be defended in society, because they don’t have a voice? Or how can Amnesty International forget that abortion is in fact harmful to the very women they are trying to defend, both physically and emotionally, causing long-term damage such as breast cancer? It is no surprise that when they do attempt to explain their actions, they cite the fraudulent argument that standing up for abortion increase maternal health by decreasing maternal deaths. All this despite the research of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation saying that this is just not true. More than this however is the underlying belief that somehow abortion will make society better for the people who live in it or that it is somehow a human right instead of the violation of one. To say that I am disappointed in Amnesty is an understatement, and it goes to show that even those organisations that seem to have the best intentions in all other areas are blind to the simple scientific fact that the unborn is just as much a human person as anyone else. I can only hope that Amnesty International will abandon its attempts to force a dehumanising stance on the unborn, and refocus its efforts on those who really need their help, inside and outside the womb.