Vatican official warns Amnesty against abortion move
SINGAPORE, 21 June: Human rights group Amnesty International will be discredited if it pushes for the decriminalisation of abortion worldwide, a senior Vatican official said Wednesday.
London-based Amnesty, founded by Catholic lawyer Peter Benenson in 1961, has begun consulting its 2 million members around the world on whether it should drop its neutral stance on abortion and start pushing countries to repeal laws that make abortion a crime.
– I have great esteem (agtelse) for Amnesty but doing this, they cut off their hands. I hope they do not do this because if they do, they are disqualified as defenders of human rights, Cardinal Renato Martino said during a visit to Singapore.
Martino, who heads the Vaticans Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice and the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, said Amnesty would lose support from Catholic activists if it defined abortion as a human right.
– When they say “reproductive rights”, they mean abortion. Do they defend the rights of everybody? No! Not of the unborn because the unborn will be killed, he added.
Amnesty has traditionally said that there is no generally accepted right to abortion in international law, but the charitys Canadian, New Zealand and British branches have now voted in favor of including a womans right to terminate her pregnancy in future campaigns.
– There is a discussion among our membership, but there is no decision. We might be looking at several years before there is one, said James Dyson, an Amnesty spokesman in London.
Tensions between the Holy See and the worlds best-known human rights group have increased since 2000 when Amnesty lent its voice to groups pushing for the UN to include the right to legal abortion in a declaration on women’s rights.
Amnesty then accused the Vatican of entering into “an unholy alliance” with a number of Muslim and developing countries to stop abortion from being enshrined in international law.
Kilde: The Push Journal
