Abortion for Disability Breaches Convention - UN

25.10.2017

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the United Nations has officially stated that abortion of children because of a disability violates the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Many countries which permit abortion have laws which make the fact that the baby may have a disability one of the grounds for abortion. It is one of the options being considered by the Irish government, if they can get rid of the 8th Amendment. Against this growing acceptance of eugenic abortion, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the United Nations has just declared in an official document that “Laws which explicitly allow for abortion on grounds of impairment violate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Art,. 4,5,8)”. This Committee further explained that this type of abortion is often based on inaccurate diagnosis and that “even if it is not false, the assessment perpetuates notions of stereotyping disability as incompatible with a good life”.

In this declaration, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities directly opposes the UN Human Rights Committee, which is seeking to reinterpret the “right to life” as implying a right to abortion “most notably … when the foetus suffers from fatal impairment”. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities asks for the removal of this assessment.

This declaration of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is very important and highlights the enduring threat to people with disabilities posed by eugenic abortion. In 1947, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had to oppose efforts to permit the “prevention of the birth of children mentally handicapped” and children “born from parents suffering from mental illness”. The similarity of these propositions with the Nazi ideology was denounced at that time.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also took a stand against a so-called “right to euthanasia”, for, according to them, it “perpetuates stereotypes about severely impaired people suffering and being better off dead”.

ECLJ. October 23. Family & Life. October 25.