(National Review) There can no longer be any doubt: The international public-health establishment has gone absolutist on allowing abortion at any time, for any reason, without restrictions of any kind.
Specifically, the WHO has issued new guidelines that demand countries legalize abortion without any gestational time limit. From the Daily Mail story:
New guidelines issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) claim laws preventing abortion at any point during pregnancy risk violating the rights of ‘women, girls or other pregnant persons . . .
The WHO document recommends ‘full decriminalisation of abortion’ and the scrapping of laws and regulations that ‘prohibit abortion based on gestational limits’ and ‘restrict abortion’ on any grounds.
It says a review of 21 studies found that when women are denied later terminations it ‘can be viewed as [being] incompatible with . . . international human rights law’.
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Of course. Sigh.
That isn’t all. The WHO also wants to curtail medical conscience rights and permit sex-selection abortion. Specifically, the organization wants to:
- Allow abortion under all circumstances – ruling out laws banning terminations because the foetus is the ‘wrong’ sex;
- Stop women requiring approval from a doctor or nurse to have a termination;
- Roll out ‘pills by post’ schemes so that women can be sent abortion medication after a phone call;
- Curtail medical professionals’ rights to refuse to take part in abortions on conscience grounds.
Because there can never be enough abortions, and the unborn have no rights that any born person is bound to respect.
Demonstrating how out of touch the WHO is, the organization disdains any thought that this issue could have any moral components or, apparently, that there can be any legitimate view other than theirs:
Nowhere in the 210-page document is there mention of the ethical debate about the rights of the unborn child, nor if abortions are morally acceptable when after 22-24 weeks the foetus has a good chance of surviving if born prematurely.
It is also silent on sex-selective abortion, despite the termination of female foetuses being common in countries such as India, Pakistan and China.
The WHO has forgotten that the entire world does not share the moral and policy perspectives of progressive Americans, Western European elites, and the odious CCP. In this sense, these so-called leaders are trying to impose policies on the world that I wager the majority of the people it supposedly serves do not find moral or right.
Editor's note: Wesley J. Smith is an author and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. @thewesleyjsmith. This article was published by National Review and is reprinted with permission.
