UN Commissioner Ramps Up Abortion Attack on US

07.06.2019

A top official at the United Nations has joined the UN’s efforts to pressure the USA over recently passed state laws restricting abortion. Kate Gilmore, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights said that US policy on abortion is a form of extremist hate that amounts to the torture of women.

“We have not called it out in the same way we have other forms of extremist hate, but this is gender-based violence against women, no question,” Gilmore told The Guardian.

“It’s clear it’s torture – it’s a deprivation of a right to health,” she warned, pointing out that the committee of experts assigned to monitor the implementation of the nine core UN human rights instruments have each “independently declared the absolute prohibition of abortion … is against human rights”.

Gilmore, appointed deputy high commissioner in 2015 after years working with Amnesty International, said the banning of abortion in some US states and the attempts by the Trump administration to remove pro-abortion language from key international documents was “deeply distressing”.

“This is a crisis. It’s a crisis directed at women,” she said, warning that we had not yet felt the full extent of it.

Gilmore said that while rulings from the human rights commission have no enforcement mechanism, they can help pressure governments to act. “The human rights system doesn’t have an army, but what we know is many national courts follow that jurisprudence in their own rulings,” she said. “It builds up a body of law.”

The Guardian. June 4.