Guatemala Supreme Court Strikes Down UNFPA Pro-Abortion Manual

By | December 21, 2017

NEW YORK, December 22 (C-Fam) A scathing sentence of the Supreme Court of Guatemala on December 8 ordered government officials to withdraw a controversial pro-abortion human rights manual prepared with the help of the UN Population Fund.

The sentence describes at length how the manual promotes abortion directly as a “right,” as well as indirectly and through euphemisms such as the “right to safe abortion” and “pregnancy termination.” The court rebutted that “abortion is never safe for the unborn child,” adding that abortion also hurts women’s minds and bodies.

“The Court surpassed all our expectations in defending the protection of life from conception,” Astrid Ríos told the Friday Fax. Ríos is a lawyer with the Associacion la Familia Importa (AFI) which brought the challenge to the manual before the Supreme Court.

The Court shot down arguments from government officials about an international trend to progressively liberalize abortion laws.

In the case of the right to life, the progressive realization of rights “is not to be found in pushing the possibility of annihilating the life of the innocent,” the Court said. This is a “perversion” of what progress should mean, the Court said. Helping women in crisis pregnancies would be progress, it explained, “not violence against the innocent.”

The Court also declared that the human rights official, known as procurator, who prepared the manual with the help of the UN Population Fund “like all public officials is subject to the law, and not superior to it.” Guatemala protects children in the womb from the moment of conception. The Supreme Court cited both Article 3 of the Guatemalan Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights to which Guatemala is a party. The treaty explicitly protects children from the moment of conception.

The Court also warned that abortion “fundamentally transforms society, in the sense of making it progressively insensitive to human suffering and the piecemeal destruction of human life” and said it is “gradually leading to the exclusion of those most needy of protection, such as, the unborn, the sick, the elderly.” The court pointed to “assisted suicide and euthanasia, even for children,” in countries that have legalized abortion as an example.

The Court ordered the human rights procurator to withdraw the manual and to make repairs for the misinformation as a result of its dissemination.

Following the negative media coverage and public outrage about the manual, the procurator published a sanitized version of the manual three days after the sentence was issued. He has apparently petitioned the Supreme Court to review its decision in light of this.

Sandra Moran, an openly lesbian and pro-abortion congresswoman and an abortion group known as Mujeres Transformando el Mundo (MTM Guatemala) have challenged the sentence before a separate Constitutional Court in Guatemala that only deals with constitutional issues. MTM Guatemala is backed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood.

Ríos told the Friday Fax she does not expect the Constitutional Court could agree wholesale with the Supreme Court because some judges on the constitutional tribunal are known to be pro-abortion. However, she said the Constitutional court should reject the challenge based on lack of standing because neither the Congresswoman nor the abortion group were parties to the original lawsuit.

 

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