When Pro-Life Countries Surrender: Evidence from Human Rights Database

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WASHINGTON, D.C. July 11 (C-Fam) C-Fam’s new human rights database shows how pressure on pro-life countries does not diminish once they allow abortion. It increases until they allow abortion on demand and become radicalized abortion advocates themselves.

This week, the committee monitoring the UN treaty on discrimination against women published its reports on ten countries that had ratified it.  Among them were two countries that used to have strong pro-life laws but have repealed them in recent years: Ireland and Mexico.

The CEDAW Committee has a long history of pressuring both countries to liberalize their abortion laws. In 1999 and 2005, it called on Ireland to facilitate a national dialogue about changing their restrictions, and in 2017, it demanded that the Eighth Amendment to Ireland’s constitution be amended to allow abortion, as well as legalizing abortion on broad grounds and decriminalizing it in all cases.

Ireland did repeal its constitutional protections for the unborn in 2018.  However, the CEDAW Committee continues to push Ireland to go further.  It welcomes the passage of Ireland’s law legalizing abortion, but expresses concern about the lack of available abortion services, the practice of conscientious objection to abortion by health care workers, and the stigma that still remains toward abortion.  It asks Ireland to “consider the possibility of fully decriminalizing abortion and abolishing the mandatory three-day waiting period.”

Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion at the federal level in 2021.  The CEDAW Committee had been calling for this since 1998. Now it is telling Mexico to harmonize abortion laws across the different Mexican states in order to ensure access to legal abortion.

In its recent review, the committee expressed satisfaction about the Supreme Court ruling, but noted that nine states still criminalize abortion.  They reiterated their call to “harmonize criminal law provisions with legislative advances on abortion access,” to dismiss cases brought against women accused of having illegal abortions, and to “address stigma and resistance by healthcare providers through mandatory training.”

Before changing their laws, both Ireland and Mexico had withstood pressure from UN human rights experts, citing their national sovereignty and pointing to the agreement from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development that held that the abortion was not an international human right, but something for national governments to address.

Once the laws of Mexico and Ireland allowed abortion their governments began to promote abortion as a human rights issue internationally. Both countries abandoned not only their legal protections for the unborn, but also their position that abortion was a matter of national sovereignty.  They lost no time before starting to apply pressure to their fellow nations, just as they themselves had been pressured.

C-Fam’s human rights database also shows how in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), where countries evaluate each other’s human right records, Ireland called on Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic to decriminalize abortion, and also pressured El Salvador and Malta.

Mexico has similarly used the UPR to promote abortion as a right, pressuring seventeen countries so far in the ongoing fourth UPR cycle, including the Bahamas, Ecuador, El Salvador,, Nigeria, and Tuvalu.  Mexico urged Romania to ensure access to “safe” abortion and comprehensive sexuality education.  It told Japan to remove the requirement for spousal consent and to ensure that women are able to access abortion regardless of their migration status in Uruguay.

The new reports from the CEDAW Committee will be added to C-Fam’s database when the final versions are published; they are currently available in draft form.

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