Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com
11/30/2012
The Senate is expected to vote on the pro-abortion CRPD treaty on Wednesday and pro-life groups are asking pro-life advocates to contact members of the Senate urging them to vote against it.
The U.S. Senate is poised to vote on ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, after members voted 61-36 to move the treaty to the floor for debate.
The International Right to Life Federation says pro-life groups oppose this legislation because it leaves open the potential for the international community to permit sterilization or abortion for the disabled. The terminology, found in Article 25, requires, “free or affordable health care including the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programs.”
Bradley Mattes, president of the International Right to Life Federation, stated, “This is a misleading measure in that it does nothing to protect life. It is disguised as a way to ‘help’ the disabled. Instead it intentionally sacrifices the most vulnerable – the disabled and the unborn – all in the name of population control.”…
…“Translation: the global community could force America to sanction sterilization or abortion for the disabled–at taxpayer expense” he said. “Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tried to neutralize the threat during the mark-up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Unfortunately, his amendment (which would have stopped the treaty from forcing abortion policy on countries that sign) was thwarted by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) after a debate.”…
The complete article is at LifeNews.com
H/T Joe Miller
Update: U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Disabled
…Its defenders suggest that other nations will respect our excellent treatment of the disabled more if we sign the treaty, but that claim is largely unsubstantiated. “I’m unwilling to indulge the unsupported assumption that that is true,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, tells National Review Online. “Simply because people have stated it over and over and over again doesn’t make it true, especially when no one has been able to articulate, at least not to me, any sound basis for reaching that conclusion. I just don’t believe it.”
Groves is on the same page. “There is no American living here in the U.S. whose life will change one iota because the United States joins this treaty,” he tells NRO. “So why the heck are we going to join it?”
That’s a fair question, especially given the treaty’s serious downsides…
…Our government, based on the Constitution, defines rights in terms of what the government cannot do to its citizens, not in terms of what it owes them. But the U.N. language emphasizes what the signatories owe to their citizens, what they must do in order to protect these newly enumerated “rights.” In the past, we rejected a treaty that referred to “economic, social, and cultural rights,” while Soviet-bloc countries were quick to embrace such language…
Read the whole thing.
