Biden Nominates Pro-Abortion Lawyer to State Department Legal Post

By Alexis I. Fragosa, Esq. | January 13, 2022

Sarah Cleveland, nominee for Legal Advisor to the Department of State

WASHINGTON, D.C. January 13 (C-Fam) President Biden has nominated Sarah Cleveland as chief legal advisor to the Department of State. Cleveland is best known for promoting abortion as an international human right while serving on the UN Human Rights Committee.

In 2018, Cleveland joined other members of the Human Rights Committee in adopting General Comment 36 which claimed for the first time that the “right to life” clause in the treaty included a right to abortion.

General Comment 36 also asserted that governments must “remove existing barriers that deny effective access by women and girls to safe and legal abortion,” including laws protecting medical providers who object to performing abortions because of conscience.

Critics expressed concern about Cleveland’s nomination considering her participation in drafting General Comment 36.

“Ms. Cleveland believes that an international expert should have final say in determining America’s policies regulating abortions – not U.S. courts,” a seasoned UN expert told the Friday Fax. “If she was ever called upon to advise about the UN system and asked whether the U.S. has the right to legislate on abortion, she would say no because the UN Human Rights Committee said abortion is an international right.”

Cleveland’s clear bias in favor of the authority of international human rights bodies over the U.S. government and U.S. courts is exemplified in a 2019 letter sent by Cleveland to the Secretary of State Michael Pompeo that harshly chastised Pompeo for the establishment of the Commission on Unalienable Rights convened to promote authentic human rights like voting, religion, and the press.

“[T]he U.S. government is bound to certain obligations codified in widely ratified treaties,” the letter asserted. “[T]he international human rights movement is . . . based on the painstaking work of social movements, scholars, and diplomats, through international agreements and law.”

Cleveland also said that the Commission’s purpose, to provide advice “on human rights to the Secretary of State, grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human rights,” was “harmful to the global effort to protect the rights of all people and a waste of resources.”

Comparing the U.S. to a dictatorship, the letter claimed that the Commission’s mandate – to distinguish the difference between “unalienable” rights and new positive rights granted by governments – merely served to justify discarding inconvenient rights acknowledged by the international human rights mechanisms.

Under General Comment 36, abortion on demand is one such inconvenient right recognized by the UN Human Rights Committee but not the U.S. government. If international human rights mechanisms had the authority to dictate U.S. policy, then not only would the U.S. be obligated to allow abortion on demand up until birth, but it would be required to fund these abortions because it has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Cleveland also complained that many individual members of the Commission, which included clergy and scholars, were known for their focus on religious freedom and “extreme positions” on abortion and the homosexual/transgender agenda.

Because the Department of State implements foreign assistance worldwide, including healthcare programming to which the Helms Amendment applies, critics have also expressed concern over Cleveland’s pro-abortion bias coupled with Biden Administration’s recent signal that it intends to reinterpret the Helms Amendment.

In this week’s confirmation hearing no senator questioned Cleveland’s radical abortion position, including ostensibly pro-life senators James Risch (R-ID), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Rob Portman (R-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), Todd Young (R-IN), John Barrasso (R-WY), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Rounds (R-SD), and Bill Hagerty (R-TN).

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