Last week, nearly 200 human rights organizations and experts sent a letter calling on the United Nations to intervene and rebuke the United States over the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, undermining a so-called right to abortion.
"People residing in the U.S. who can become pregnant are facing a human rights crisis," the letter claims, also suggesting a number of actions for the U.N. to take, including "calls for the U.S. to comply with its obligations under international law and calls for private companies to take a number of actions to protect reproductive rights."
Dr. Rebecca Oas, director of research for the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), says it is wrong for more than one reason.
"There are certainly standards that we have agreed to," she notes. "The U.S. has ratified several multilateral U.N. human rights treaties, and so those are matters of binding international human rights law. But the thing is, none of the treaties that we have ratified, and none of the other ones that the U.N. hosts that we have not ratified, actually include a right to abortion."
Similarly, the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the Constitution contained a right to abortion, which it did and does not.
"What these activists for abortion are trying to do is call on various human rights entities within the U.N. to put further pressure on the United States to enshrine abortion as a right," Dr. Oas summarizes. "What they're claiming is that we have an obligation to do this as a matter of international human rights, as if that sort of overrides the Constitution."
In her related op-ed, Joy Stockbauer points out that prior to the Dobbs decision, abortion laws in the United States were "among the most extreme in the world."
"The national baseline standard was legal abortion at any point in gestation, for any reason. States could not protect children prior to viability — which the law maintained at around 24 weeks gestation, despite children having survived birth as early in gestation as 21 weeks and one day," she points out. "U.S. abortion laws were on par with only five other nations in the world, the majority of whom are notorious human rights abusers: Canada, China, Vietnam, and North, and South Korea. By contrast, only three out of 52 European nations fail to protect the unborn after 15 weeks gestation."
Dr. Oas asserts that no international right to abortion exists. Even if such a treaty did exist, then the U.S. would not a party to it. As a matter of national sovereignty, America makes her own laws, and they are supposed to conform with the U.S Constitution, not the United Nations.
