.-
A
number of pro-life organizations, including the Catholic 'Aid to the
Church in Need' (ACN), have raised their voices against the
international human rights advocacy group, Amnesty International, and
its declared intention to spread abortion rights around the world.
On
Friday, Father Joaquin Alliende, ACN’s international ecclesiastical
assistant, said that it was “With great regret we have learned that
Amnesty International has proposed advancing abortion ‘rights’ around
the world as a new mission for their organization.”
The
main paper of AI's new Sexual & Reproductive Rights Consultation
Kit states that, "Governments have responsibilities to ensure that
everyone's sexual and reproductive rights are protected."
"No
one should be discriminated against”, it added, “when and if they
attempt to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, or ask that
they be protected."
AI
is now calling for the global decriminalisation of abortion and say
that there should be widespread abortion on demand in cases involving
sexual assault or risk to a woman's life.
Fr.
Alliende, a Chilean priest, went on to explain: “AI has earned a high
reputation for its intensive efforts to gain the release of innocent
prisoners on conscience. ACN, a charity that is also often a ‘voice of
thevoiceless,’ highly appreciates this moral commitment of AI.”
However,
he said that “Now by proposing a pro-abortion initiative AI is
abandoning its own noble ethical principles, thereby shaking the very
foundations on which it is built; for the simple reason that unborn
life in a mother’swomb is the very weakest of all threatened and
persecuted human beings.”
“Thus”,
he said,“the day this initiative was launched will become a day of
mourning for all those who are unconditionally committed to true
humanism,” he concluded.
Amnesty
International’s current policy on abortion states that the group “takes
no position on whether or not women have a right to choose to terminate
unwanted pregnancies; there is no generally accepted right to abortion
in international human rights law.”
