UN Body Attacks Nicaragua's
Abortion Ban
By William F. Jasper
"At the recently concluded session of the
United Nations Human Rights Council,
Nicaragua came up against intense and
concerted international pressure from fellow
United Nations (UN) member states over the
abortion ban the Latin American country's
National Assembly adopted unanimously into
law four years ago," reports the Catholic
Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM).
"Despite promising initial evidence that the
prohibition on abortion has helped lower
maternal mortality rates," C-FAM noted in a
March 25 report by Samantha Singson,
"Nicaragua has been the target of
international pressure and scrutiny from UN
agencies, donor governments and
non-governmental organizations."
The International Planned Parenthood
Federation (IPPF), the Guttmacher Institute,
Amnesty International, and other
pro-abortion NGOs (non-governmental
organizations) have been working with
agencies of the UN and the European Union to
pressure Nicaragua to remove its
restrictions on abortion.
"Last month, Nicaragua underwent the
Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which is an
opportunity for the UN Human Rights Council
— an inter-governmental UN body made up of
47 States responsible for addressing
situations of human rights violations and
making recommendations on them — to examine
the human rights record of all member
states," C-FAM's Singson reported. The C-FAM
report continues:
Each country is reviewed every four years
with the aim of ensuring compliance with
international human rights obligations. As
part of its UPR, Nicaragua defended its
pro-life legislation reporting that "legal
amendments reflected the exercise of
sovereignty, and had been adopted by the
parliamentary majority in the national
assembly." Nicaragua stated that the
abortion ban was "an issue of sovereignty,
not a religious one" as "the majority of
Nicaraguans believed that the right to life
of the unborn was important."
Singson notes that "no UN treaty mentions
abortion and there is no binding human
rights obligation to allow abortions."
Members of the committees charged with
overseeing state compliance to the treaties,
she reports, "have taken it upon themselves
to attach a 'right to abortion' under
long-established rights like the rights to
the highest attainable standard of health,
privacy or the right to be free from
discrimination and have used this
misinterpretation of international law to
push abortion on sovereign nations."
At the UN Human Rights Council meeting in
New York, a number of countries castigated
Nicaragua for its abortion ban. Eleven
countries — Slovenia, Netherlands, Norway,
the Czech Republic, Mexico, United Kingdom,
Belgium, France, Finland, Sweden, and
Germany — "all pressed Nicaragua to repeal
the abortion ban," C-FAM reported.
The abortion ban was passed unanimously by
the National Assembly in 2006 and signed by
President Enrique Bolanos 10 days before
President-elect Daniel Ortega assumed
office. As leader of the Marxist-Leninist
Sandinista Party junta that ruled Nicaragua
during the 1980s, Ortega supported abortion.
However, in order to gain sufficient support
for a plurality in the 2006 elections, the
unpopular Ortega made a pretense of
re-converting to the Catholic Church he had
persecuted while previously holding the
reins of power. Part of that pretense
involved publicly condemning abortion and
giving support to the new abortion ban.
The conversion was not that convincing,
apparently, and he barely squeaked by, eking
out a plurality of 38 percent. Pro-life
analysts believe that Ortega continues to
support the abortion ban because of his need
to avoid offending the overwhelmingly
Catholic voting base, not because of any
pro-life convictions of his own, even as he
continues to strengthen his ties to the
communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba,
which is strongly pro-abortion. |
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