The path to legalising abortion

In February 2004, the National Committee on Women published a draft Bill on Women's Rights.  This article describes the grave implications of this bill, and demonstrates that, inter alia, this is the latest attempt to legalise abortion in Sri Lanka. It is vital that the language in the draft is revised in order to remove ambiguities before the bill is enacted into law.  Failure to replace the euphemisms that it contains with specific and clear language will put the power of the law behind the agenda of the Family Planning Association (FPA) and the UN.  The consequences will not only be the legalisation and liberalisation of abortion in Sri Lanka but also the demeaning of marriage, of the family, and of the dignity of women.  It is crucial that steps are taken to ensure that this bill in its final form will genuinely be of service to the women of Sri Lanka in affirming and upholding their dignity.   

By Eshan Dias 

The most relevant phrases within the bill are described and their well established interpretations are stated.  The ideology of the organisations involved in the production of the bill is exposed.  From the link established between the phrases and the objectives of their sources, the destructive implications of enacting this bill are derived.  Finally a call is made to lobby for removal of language that is open to interpretations which are oppressive to women and which deny the dignity due to women.

The language in the draft bill

Part I of the bill defines women's rights and it is constituted of 12 clauses.  The clauses of primary concern are clause (3) and clause (12).  Clause (3) states that "women shall enjoy.the right to control their bodies, and rights relating to child birth".  Clause (12) requires "the. advancement of women's rights in accordance with the framework of the Women's Charter of Sri Lanka., and international treaties relating to women's rights".  

Interpretations

Let us consider the "rights relating to child birth", mentioned in clause (3).  Those who are unfamiliar with the parlance of radical feminism may be inclined to believe that this implies the provision of facilities for safe delivery of babies and post-natal care.  However, if the words of clause (3) are to be interpreted in accordance to "international treaties" (cf. clause 12), particularly those originating from the UN, the consequences will be tragic.  This is because inspite of official denial, the UN promotes abortion.   Andras Vamos-Goldman, a Canadian delegate to the UN publicly admitted that to UN organisations such as UNICEF and the UNFPA "reproductive health services" means abortion (cf. Third Preparatory Meeting for the World Summit on Children, June 2001).

The United Nations Hague Forum of 1999 attempted to define access to abortion as a universal right under the cover of "reproductive health and rights."  In addition to clause (3), similar words are found in the Women's Charter (cf. clause 12) that is based on the UN's Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women.  Article 13 iii-a of the Women's Charter mentions that "the state shall ensure women's right to control their reproductivity".  This shows that euphemisms found in UN documents have been absorbed into this Sri Lankan document with nothing to prevent interpretations hostile to the dignity of human life. 

Agenda of the Family Planning Association

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) is a worldwide federation of benignly named Family Planning Associations.  The founder of Planned Parenthood was an eugenicist by the name of Margaret Sanger.  The IPPF was in fact housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society when it was founded in 1952.  Eugenics is a movement and an ideology aimed at racial purification, a means of improving the human race by controlling reproduction.  Margaret Sanger desired "more children from the fit, less from the unfit - that [being] the chief aim of birth control." (Birth Control Review, May 1919)  In The Pivot of Civilisation, she stated that she "prefers the policy of immediate sterilisation for making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded", and (in Women And The New Race) that "the most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

On the subject of maternal care to poor women, Sanger wrote that "a special type of philanthropy or benevolence. which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other. is to supply medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers".  The IPPF today proclaims Sanger as its "visionary founder".

Dr. Sriani Basnayake, who is a member of the National Committee on Women through which the Bill on Women's Rights was produced, publicly acknowledges her desire to legalise abortion in Sri Lanka.  The IPPF, with whom she and the national Family Planning Association is affiliated, makes no secret of its objective of legalising and liberalising abortion worldwide.  Indeed, the IPPF and its national affiliates are the world's largest abortion providers.  Further, the IPPF via the Family Planning Associations exerts unparalleled influence on national policymaking regarding population issues.  The Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka exists with the long term objective of legalising abortion in this country, and this Bill on Women's Rights realises that objective.

The IPPF routinely and deliberately disregards national sovereignty and national abortion laws.  According the IPPF, the "Family Planning Associations should operate right up to the edge of what is legal, and sometimes even beyond where the law is uncertain.". The IPPF also believes that "Family Planning Associations. should not use the absence of law or the existence of an unfavourable law as an excuse for inaction.  In its document entitled The Human Right To Family Planning, the IPPF states that "Family Planning Associations ... should not use the absence of law or the existence of an unfavourable law as an excuse for inaction: Action outside the law, and even in violation of it, is part of the process of stimulating change."  An example of this is their distribution and sale throughout Sri Lanka of the morning-after pill which can function as a non-surgical method of early abortion.

Agenda of the United Nations

When eugenics became unpopular after the racial purification performed by the Nazis during the second world war, the eugenic movement continued its work in the population control movement, facilitated by the global hysteria about the "population bomb".  It is reasonable to believe that it was the same ideology and activity, in spite of the change of name (from open eugenics to population planning), considering that the leading personalities were the same.  The sources of funding, such as Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller, were also the same.   Now that it is evident that Western countries need more children to avoid a demographic catastrophe, the focus of the eugenic movement has shifted from outright population control on to women's rights.  Mention of the sociological objectives of the population control movement is necessary in order to point out that it is not only the dignity of women and of human life that is at stake due to the threat of abortion, but also, through population control programmes driven by eugenic forces hidden behind radical feminists, the flourishing of our race is under threat (cf. P. Jalsevac, 2004, The Inherent Racism Of Population Control). 

In 1967, at the height of the "population bomb" hysteria, and amid the crisis in the UN regarding UNICEF's collaboration in population control, the UN founded the UNFPA with a mandate to save the earth from the further spread of humanity.  The UNFPA chiefly exists to reduce population growth in the developing world.  It distributes abortion equipment and abortion drugs and funnels money to NGOs that actually perform abortions.  An example of such an abortion provider is Marie Stopes International.  The UNFPA funds, assists, protects coercive population control programmes carried out by government regimes in China, Vietnam, Peru, and Kosovo and is therefore complicit in human rights violations carried out by these regimes including forced abortions, forced sterilisations and infanticide (cf. D. Sylva, 2002, The UN Population Fund: An assault On The World's People). 

Sex selective abortions in China offer a morbid example of discrimination against women.  In January 2004, Kofi Annan addressed the International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC), a group working for worldwide abortion on demand for women and girls.  Praising this work he said they are a "shining example" for the world.  The IWHC also works for the radical reinterpretation of UN human rights documents. IWHC admits that no UN document "explicitly asserts a woman's right to abortion."  However, they assert that "despite these qualifications, the conference documents and human rights instruments - if broadly interpreted and skillfully argued - can be very useful tools in efforts to expand access to . abortion."

Common objectives of the IPPF and the UNFPA

The similarity of the objectives of the IPPF and UNFPA are manifest in the memoranda of understanding highlighting their "common goals" (UNFPA and IPPF sign Memorandum of Understanding, Dispatches - News from UNFPA, No. 9, September 1996).   In 2002, 11 board directors of the US Committee for UNFPA were associated with the IPPF.  Furthermore, the former executive director of the UNFPA Nafis Sadik, became a board director of the Centre for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP) at the end of her term at the UNFPA.  The stated goals of the CRLP are the recognition of abortion as a fundamental right and the full legalisation of abortion on demand in every nation of the world. 

Implication of the bill

Abortion is the destruction of life.  Abortion is in fact a violation of woman, an act of violence to a woman, in addition to the fact that it an act of fatal violence to her child. Unless changes are made to this bill to ensure the dignity of women and of their unborn children, it is evident that Clauses (3) and (12) of the Bill on Women's Rights will constitute the legalisation of abortion in Sri Lanka. 

In order to prevent the legalisation of a culture of death in our country, it is of paramount importance that explicit definitions of 'services' and "rights" in relation to pregnancy, child birth and family planning need to be made in the bill.  It will be prudent to state explicitly at the beginning of the document that the most fundamental human right is the right to life itself.  That is, once one is conceived, one must have the right to live.  Without the right to life, all other rights are meaningless.   All interpretations of the bill, and of UN documents associated with it, must be subject to this fundamental right to life.

Abortifacients

It must also be recognised that abortion is committed not only via surgical methods (such as suction aspiration, dilation and curettage, and salt poisoning), but also by means of so-called "contraceptive" devices, and by drugs.  The Women's Charter in fact desires "the provision of safe family planning devices" (article 13, section iii-a) by the state.  While none of these "devices" are safe, many are abortifacient, that is, they cause abortion.   The coil or intra-uterine device is purely abortifacient.

The primary mechanism of steroidal drugs such as the oral "contraceptive" or birth control pill is to inhibit ovulation.  However, it does not suppress ovulation altogether.  A secondary mechanism of this pill is to weaken the uterine wall.  Therefore when a new life is conceived at a time when breakthrough ovulation has occurred, the pill functions as an abortifacient since the uterine wall has been made inhospitable (Potter, L. S., 1996, Obstet. Gynecol., 88, 13S; Hormonal Contraception, American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 1994).  The function of the so-called emergency "contraception" pill (which is a higher dose of the "contraceptive" pill) can also, obviously, be abortifacient because it is taken the morning after, or even several days after conception could have occurred.

Further interpretations

The issue of abortifacients highlights the danger of the section in Clause (3) which states that women should have the "right to control their bodies".  Without clarification with regard to how this statement may be interpreted, and considering that the statement is to be interpreted according to international treaties (cf. Clause 12), these words will constitute  the legalisation and institutionalised promotion of methods of birth control that cause death to the conceived child.  Another interpretation of this 'right' would be the promotion of the mutilation of women via surgical sterilisation. 

Further implications

It is important for the bill to affirm that it is wrong to resort to surgical abortion or abortifacients as a means of family planning.  It must be recognised that it is an assault on the dignity of women to consider their wonderful gift of fertility as a disease to be treated with steroids, or their genius to nurture and give birth to a baby as a problem to be controlled.   It is women who have their children ripped from their wombs, women who suffer the side-effects of the drugs, women who have devices implanted in them.   Promotion of birth control practices is actually a means of oppressing women and denying their dignity as fertile human beings.  When there is contraception and abortion, woman can be considered to be available at any time for sex, irrespective of her health, of the state of her cycle of fertility, and irrespective of the child she may conceive.    Likewise, even though it is contended that contraception and abortion gives control to women over their bodies, it is largely ignored that this same concept has a deep effect on male psychology, irrevocably removing any notion of male responsibility.  

Repeat of history

The failure of the contraceptive experiment in Western societies is evident now:  broken families and high divorce rates, decreased fertility and an impending population implosion, proliferation of STDs, growing teenage pregnancies and growing abortion rates in spite of a copious availability of contraceptive information and easy access to contraception.  All this also began with the introduction of the birth control pill and the talk of needing to legalise abortion in order to prevent back street abortions.  It is clear that where there is more contraception, there is more abortion, and not vice versa. 

For example in England and Wales, the number of surgical abortions per 1000 women in the age range 15-44 has increased by over a factor of three since 1968.  In the US, there is one surgical abortion every 24 seconds.  This statistic does not include chemical abortions or abortions using methods such as uterine evacuation via vacuum aspiration, sometimes called "menstrual regulation".  Even according to the IPPF's Alan Guttmacher Institute, pregnancy rates among teenagers increased by 23 percent from 1972 to 1990 which was the period during which contraceptive education or 'sex education', began and became widespread. 

Sri Lankans need not make the same mistakes half a century later by legitimising and promoting a contraceptive culture which does not honour the sanctity of life or the gift of fertility.  In April 2004, the US passed an act recognising the legal rights of the un-born child, which was denounced by the IPPF President Gloria Feldt.  The US Unborn Victims of Violence Act defines the "child in utero" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."   So while some societies are beginning to recover from their mistakes, should we bow to pressure from UN agencies and abortion providers and make the same mistakes they made, and suffer the same consequences? 

Conclusions

The Bill on Women's Rights should seek to affirm the fundamental right to life and the dignity of the human person, whether female or male, from conception until natural death. 

This bill contains misleading and ambiguous statements whose interpretations need to be clarified.   We should not adopt problematic wording, but use unequivocal language.

The bill should focus on affirming the dignity and genius of women, and not sanction their oppression and humiliation through abortion, sterilisation, and contraception.

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