Leftwing Congressmen Ask State Department to Announce Global Right to Abortion

By

Rasihda Tlaib (D-MI)

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 28 (C-Fam) Seventy-one mostly leftwing members of the Democratic caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives have sent a letter to State Department legal advisor about the status of abortion in international law.

The letter, signed by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and other radical members of the House, expresses their “deep concern by the Supreme Court’s decision” which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question of abortion to the states.

The signers praise Secretary of State Anthony Blinken for his “stated commitment to ‘helping provide access to reproductive health services and advancing reproductive rights around the world.”

The Congressmen believe returning the issue of abortion to the states violates the country’s international human rights obligations. They claim several treaties ratified by the U.S. have explicit protections for legal abortion. Specifically, they cite the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

They also cite treaties the President has signed but the Senate has not ratified, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The problem for the Congressmen making these claims is that none of these hard law treaties mention abortion. Only one of them — the treaty on disability rights — even mentions “reproductive health.”

Their argument that the U.S. is obliged under hard law to have a federal right to abortion is based exclusively on the non-binding comments made by the expert groups called “treaty monitoring bodies” that are connected to each UN human rights treaty. For the past few decades, the treaty monitoring bodies have taken it upon themselves to reinterpret the treaties to include controversial social issues such as a right to abortion and “sexual orientation and gender identity.”

For instance, the Human Rights Committee has determined the “right to life” passage in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes a right to abortion. Members of these treaty monitoring bodies do not have the authority to rewrite hard law treaties that governments spent months—and even years—negotiating, and then ratified on the basis of a vote of their national legislatures.

The extravagant claims of these treaty bodies are one of the major reasons the United States has never ratified most of them. Senators have concluded it is better for the U.S. not to become subject to the whims of experts who generally are chosen for their ideological positions. The Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, for instance, refused to ratify the treaty on the rights of persons with disabilities because of what they saw as the increasingly radical treaty monitoring bodies.

When governments meet to criticize each other’s human rights records face-to-face in the ongoing Universal Periodic Review, it becomes clear that their concerns are not those of the so-called human rights experts on the treaty monitoring committees. Abortion and sexual orientation and gender identity are rarely mentioned in these settings. There tends to be a huge disconnect between largely leftwing “human rights experts” and the Member States who actually negotiate and ratify hard law treaties.

It is unclear whether the State Department will respond but the Biden administration is generally favorable to these arguments.

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