Human Rights Watch Pushes Abortion as Ecuador Beefs-Up Pro-Family Approach

By | April 30, 2015

NEW YORK, May 1 (C-Fam) A human rights group is misrepresenting international law to the Ecuadoran government in order to change the country’s policies on abortion. At the same time, Ecuador’s president calls abortion “treason” and is swapping what he calls family-planning “hedonism” with pro-family, parent-driven values.

Human Rights Watch told a key politician in a letter last week “to spearhead a reform process to ensure that Ecuador complies with its international human rights obligations” on abortion. Even Human Rights Watch admits these obligations are no more than suggestions by UN bureaucrats, even so, the group insists they are binding on Member States.

But experts disagree. The group’s demand to “legalize abortion in a broad range of cases has no basis” in UN treaties or any other legally binding convention to which Ecuador belongs, said Teresa Collett, a law professor at University of St. Thomas.

“In spite of persistent and aggressive efforts on the part of certain Western nations and international activists, the legality of induced abortion remains strictly a matter of domestic law,” Collett said.

Restrictions on abortion “violate several women’s human rights” including “life” and “freedom from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” Human Rights Watch wrote to Dr. Mauro Andino, who heads up Ecuador’s Justice commission.

Last week, Andino cited a UN committee’s recommendation as reason for changing Ecuador’s age of consent for marriage or legal union.

Ecuador’s constitution protects life from conception. Its criminal code allows exceptions if a pregnancy threatens the mother’s life, or untreatable health risk, or if a woman with a mental disability is pregnant by rape.

A 2014 Pew survey found 95% of Protestants and 84% of Catholics in Ecuador say abortion is morally wrong.

Human Rights Watch and Planned Parenthood Global ramped up their campaign telling Ecuador to legalize abortion earlier this year when it was the country’s turn to come before a UN women’s rights committee. The two groups asked the committee to tell Ecuador to remove all restrictions and make abortion easy to access.

This committee, comprised of free-lancing women’s rights advocates, monitors countries’ compliance with the UN Women’s Treaty, known as CEDAW. This committee notoriously pressures countries on issues not in the treaty, such as legalizing prostitution and abortion.

One committee member asked Ecuador if limits on abortion “could amount to torture and inhuman treatment.”

“Whenever we’ve consulted the citizens regarding abortion, the immense majority rejects prenatal euthanasia,” said Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, when HRW and Planned Parenthood previously pressured the country.

“They can do whatever they want. I will never approve the decriminalization of abortion,” Correa said. “Anything that challenges life from the moment of conception is quite simply, treason.”

Last November, Correa appointed Mónica Hernández, who favors an abstinence-only approach, to head a national family planning program.

The agency had made mistakes by removing the family in public policy to prevent teen pregnancies, Correa recently said. The strategy was “based on pure hedonism and empty; pleasure for pleasure. Now the strategy is based on values.”

“The foundation of society is not the health center,” he noted, it “is the family. The strategy was completely wrong. We must empower parents. The remedy was worse than the disease. The link with the family broke.”

“Many believe that everything is the problem of the state,” Correa said. “In the teaching of values, family is the main school. You have to talk about values and training that occurs in the family. Parents, in you there is a great responsibility.”

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