Activist Groups Summon UN Experts to Criticize U.S. Abortion Restrictions

By | June 8, 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 9 (C-Fam) UN human rights experts are criticizing the U.S., claiming that state-level abortion restrictions are putting women and girls at risk and violating the American obligations under human rights treaties.

The intervention of UN human rights experts was requested two months ago in a letter signed by almost 150 pro-abortion groups. The letter urged them to “act” on the Supreme Court decision that struck down the constitutional right to abortion.

The expert group includes members of the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls and the special rapporteurs on health, violence against women, torture, and freedom of religion, among others. The UN expert group has no power to override U.S. laws, whether at the federal or state level.

However, they “urge both the federal and state Governments to take action to reverse the regressive rhetoric seeping through the legislative system and enact positive measures to ensure access to safe and legal abortion.”  They argue that abortion restrictions result in the denial of “fundamental human rights to comprehensive healthcare including sexual and reproductive health.”

The U.S. has ratified several UN human rights treaties, including those relating to civil and political rights, eliminating racial discrimination, and ending torture, none of which mentions abortion, or “reproductive health.”

Groups of UN human rights experts have criticized the U.S. on abortion multiple times in recent years.  In 2020, they complained that some U.S. states were “manipulating the COVID-19 crisis” to restrict abortion access.  In 2021, they criticized the Texas law that banned abortions after six weeks and denounced “Supreme Court complicity” for allowing the law to stand.  Last year, they issued a statement following the Dobbs decision, characterizing it as “shocking and dangerous.”

The U.S. is not a party to the UN treaty on the elimination of discrimination against women, but that did not stop the committee that monitors compliance by countries that have ratified it from expressing its own criticism, urging the U.S. to keep abortion legal (and actually ratify the treaty.)

UN experts have involved themselves in the U.S. legal process in other ways as well; a group of them submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Dobbs, urging the court to uphold a constitutional right to abortion.  They have also intervened at the state level, sending a letter to the U.S. ambassador encouraging the New York State Senate to pass the pending “Reproductive Health Act” which would radically liberalize the state’s abortion law, adding that its passage “would be a welcome precedent for other states in the country and a hopeful signal that much-needed reform can and should be initiated.”

Despite the experts’ extremely close focus on the abortion debate in the U.S., the country no longer considers abortion to be a federal right, and the nations of the world have never agreed to a human right to abortion.

To the extent that UN independent human rights experts and expert committees assert that a right to abortion exists, they do so by citing their own and each other’s previous opinions, with no higher authority on which to draw.

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