Sexual Left Readies Radical Abortion Resolution at European Parliament

By | May 13, 2021

NEW YORK, May 14 (C-Fam) The European Parliament will debate a draft resolution that calls on EU member states to allow abortion-on-demand as a human right. The resolution on “sexual and reproductive health” will be discussed next month.

A committee of the European Parliament that deals with women’s issues adopted a draft resolution calling on EU member states to ensure that abortion-on-demand “is legal in early pregnancy and when needed beyond.”

Following the adoption of the resolution on Monday, Croatian socialist Predrag Feed Matić, sponsor of the resolution, said sexual and reproductive health was a “key human right.”

“The most important thing is the call for universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights for all countries around the EU without any discrimination, that means sexuality education infertility treatment, legal and safe abortion, and maternal health care,” he says in the video.

The resolution targets European countries with laws protecting unborn children, such as Poland and Malta, which ban abortion on all grounds. But it also goes after countries with liberal abortion regimes to further deregulate abortion and to limit the conscience rights of doctors and medical providers who object to participating in abortions.

“Some Member States which have legalized abortion on request or on broad social grounds nonetheless continue to maintain specific criminal sanctions for abortions performed outside of the scope of the applicable legal provisions,” the resolution states.

The draft resolution, adopted on Monday by the FEMM committee, claims that decriminalizing abortion is necessary to bring EU state laws “in line with international human rights standards” and defines the “denial of abortion” as a form of “gender-based violence” citing on the opinion of UN experts.

The resolution mentions the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to urge EU states to “recognize abortion care as urgent and as a medical procedure, thereby also rejecting all limitations in accessing it.”

The draft resolution also undermines the conscience rights of doctors and medical providers to refuse to participate in abortion and abortion referrals.

“[The European Parliament] Regrets that sometimes-common practice in Member States allows for medical practitioners, and in some occasions entire medical institutions, to refuse to provide health services on the basis of the so-called conscience clause, which leads to the denial of abortion care on grounds of religion or conscience,” one paragraph reads.

And the draft stresses that “an individual’s conscience clause may not interfere with a patient’s right to full access to healthcare and services.”

The resolution’s background paper cites the claims of abortion groups like the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher Institute, and Open Democracy, an organization founded and funded by George Soros.

The European Center for Law and Justice, a Strassburg-based group of human rights lawyers,  denied that abortion is an international right and questioned the report’s legitimacy in an analysis of the draft resolution.

“The field of health is not part of the European Union’s competences, it belongs to the States,” the group states, adding, “The European Union cannot therefore impose a ‘right to abortion.’”

The European Parliament will take action on the resolution in June. A previous draft resolution known as the “Estrela Report” failed in 2013. It declared that national health policies were not a competence of the European Union instead.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter