Rights and Wrongs

NEWS ANALYSIS: Obama’s second-term agenda will likely include an international push for greater access to contraception and abortion.

Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research for the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM)
Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research for the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) (photo: C-FAM Website)

NEW YORK — As policy analysts consider the implications of Barack Obama’s re-election and make predictions about his second-term agenda, it is clear that access to contraception will be a high priority both at home and abroad.

In mid-November, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released its 2012 world-population report. According to the report, "By Choice, Not By Chance: Family Planning, Human Rights and Development," “an estimated 222 million women lack access to reliable, high-quality family-planning services, information and supplies, putting them at risk of unintended pregnancy.”

While UNFPA is an international agency, it relies heavily on support from the United States. According to the UNFPA website, it received $35 million from the United States for the 2012 fiscal year, though President Barack Obama had requested $47.5 million to assist the UNFPA’s stated mission of  “achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality.”

 

‘Unalienable Right’ to Contraception?

On Nov. 14, one week following Obama’s re-election, UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin sent Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., a letter congratulating her on Obama’s win.

The letter stated, “We were grateful to learn that we will have continued support and vision under his leadership in ensuring that all women have access to quality and voluntary family planning and reproductive health care, an unalienable right and an imperative for the fulfillment of the potential of half the population of the world, both as citizens and as human beings. The health and rights of women and young people have proven to be pivotal and winning issues in Tuesday’s historic elections.”

Despite Osotimehin’s labeling of family planning as an “unalienable right,” there are no international treaties that enumerate a right to family planning. According to Susan Yoshihara, senior vice president for research for the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), “The attempt to make family planning a basic human right has been around since at least 1966 … but if you look at the treaties that were negotiated at the time, there is no mention of family planning.”

Said Yoshihara, “There is a mention of bringing down the stillbirth rate, so they were very interested in maternal health, but never a mention of family planning. ... The current use of family planning is an attempt to nudge countries to provide free access to contraception.”

UNFPA spokesman Richard Kollodge told the Register that “a number of international human-rights instruments, such as the 1968 Proclamation of the International Conference on Human Rights and the 1969 Declaration on Social Progress and Development proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1969, cite such a right.” Yet, as Yoshihara observes, these are not treaties and, therefore, are not binding on member states.

 

Double Standard?

While the United States continues to support UNFPA efforts to provide greater access to contraception, the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N.’s health agency to which the U.S. also belongs, continues its own campaign to promote “safe abortion.”

In its 2012 report on "Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems," WHO states, “In modern times, the risk of death from a safe, induced abortion is lower than from an injection of penicillin or carrying a pregnancy to term.”

While most opponents of abortion consider the phrase “safe abortion” to be a misnomer in itself, they are also critical of WHO’s recommended methods for “safe abortions.”

On Nov. 7, C-FAM released its own report in response, "Eleven Problems With the 2012 WHO Technical Guidance on Abortion," coauthored by Yoshihara and Rebecca Oas. According to Yoshihara, “The most fundamental problem with the WHO report is that it promotes for women in the developing world standards that are below those in the developing world. … Essentially what the WHO is doing is giving cover to those that are promoting risky behavior in the developing world.”

Specifically, Yoshihara is referring to WHO’s recommendation for repeated doses of the drug misoprostol for medical abortions during the second trimester, as well as its recommendation for vaginal administration of the drug. The C-FAM report criticizes this recommendation, noting that “vaginal use of misoprostol for abortion was linked to several women’s deaths from fatal bacterial infections,” according to a 2009 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The other, second problem, besides a lower standard of medical care,” according to Yoshihara, “is that [the report] asserts that there is a human right to abortion.” In its “safe abortion” report, WHO is careful to skirt away from specifically claiming that abortion is a recognized human right, or from specifically asserting that it should be recognized as one. But suggesting this to be the case is clearly the report’s intention.

The first chapter, which is titled “Safe Abortion Care: The Public Health and Human-Rights Rationale,” states, “Where legislation allows abortion under broad indications, the incidence of and complications from unsafe abortion are generally lower than where abortion is legally more restricted.”

Later on, in a section in another chapter titled “Women’s Health and Human Rights,” the report cites recommendations by the U.N. committees that monitor compliance with international human-rights treaties. These committees have recommended that national governments should “reform laws that criminalize medical procedures that are needed only by women and that punish women who undergo these procedures, both of which are applicable in the case of abortion,” the report notes.

Comments the report, “Given the clear link between access to safe abortion and women’s health, it is recommended that laws and policies should respect and protect women’s health and their human rights.”

A spokesperson for the World Health Organization did not respond to requests for comment about the report on “safe abortion.”

 

Rights Talk

The current U.S. support of contraception and abortion through the United Nations and other international agencies dates back to the Clinton administration, which famously used the United Nations as a means to achieve its policy goals. As is evidenced by the recent UNFPA and WHO reports, much of this support is cloaked in the language of “rights,” which defines much international-policy discourse.

Harvard Law professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon has commented eloquently about the positive benefits of our modern conception of human rights, but she also has expressed fear that a rights-based approach can lead to many dangers as well.

“Human-rights principles are not, and cannot be, a complete map of the just society,” Glendon commented in an April 2012 article that discussed her concerns in this area. “I think that better ways to discuss these kinds of matters would emerge naturally if we could expand ways for citizens themselves to have more of a say in setting the conditions under which they live, work and raise their children.”

In an effort to ease concerns of those wary of the U.N.’s continued reliance on pushing its agendas through the advancement of a “human-rights approach,” or of those who more specifically fear that international institutions were overreaching in their push for a right to family planning, UNFPA’s Kollodge noted that the “UNFPA supports no policy that pressures women to have fewer children than they desire or that provides incentives for women to have more children.”

“Again, it's all about the decision of the individual,” Kollodge added. “UNFPA respects the decisions of all individuals.”

Even so, UNFPA and WHO have a strong commitment to increased access to family planning and so-called “reproductive rights” that will affect all nations that are tied to these and other international agencies. The Obama administration has provided strong support, both rhetorically and financially, to these agencies and their mission over the past four years.

Such trends are likely to continue during the four years ahead — even if these organizations are wrong about the supposed “rights” which they are committed to promoting.

Christopher White writes from New York.