The United States (US) government on Wednesday hit back at a United Nations (UN) women’s rights panel, which accused some US states of restricting access to abortion services during the COVID-19 pandemic. US officials further rejected the notion that there is an assumed “right to abortion.”
The UN’s Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls, in a May 22 letter to the US mission in Geneva, said that US states including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee “appear to be manipulating the COVID-19 crisis to curb access to essential abortion care”. Elizabeth Broderick, the panel’s vice chair said that the situation was “the latest example illustrating a pattern of restrictions and retrogressions in access to legal abortion care across the country”.
The US mission in its response called the panel’s letter “bizarre and inexplicable” and argued that international human rights law does not recognize any “right to abortion”. The US further criticized the body for taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic “to assert the existence of such a right”, and urged the group to instead focus its resources and attention on “actual human rights abuses” taking place in other parts of the world, especially in China’s western region of Xinjiang.
“One of the reasons that the United States and others increasingly see the UN’s human rights system as utterly broken is the tendency of its self-appointed guardians to label certain policy preferences as “rights” — a practice that devalues the entire human rights enterprise and leads to absurd outcomes such as the above-referenced letter. At the same time, we see violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a massive scale that generate little or no comment by these same guardians,” the statement read.
Far-right evangelical Christians form an important part of President Donald Trump’s voter base, and his administration has sought to put their causes of restricting abortion and preserving gun ownership at the top of his policy agenda. On May 18 of this year, John Barsa, the acting administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), urged the UN to remove all references to sexual and reproductive health from its COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), emphasizing that classification of access to abortion as an “essential service” risked undermining a united response to the global crisis. In April 2019, the US threatened to veto a UN Security Council resolution on ending wartime rape if references to reproductive health were not removed.
US Rejects UN Panel’s Accusation Regarding Restricted Abortion Access During Pandemic
US officials further rejected the notion that there is an assumed “right to abortion.”
August 27, 2020
SOURCE: REUTERS