Amnesty International, the human rights group, has criticised the Dominican Republic for moves to ban abortion. The country's congress is considering a new constitutional provision to guarantee the right to life from conception to natural death. Amnesty claims that banning abortion "could lead to violations of women's human rights", even though it admitted that "international human rights law...already protects prenatal life".That admission is very revealing, because other pro-abortion groups won't admit such an unpalatable (to them) truth. It is an Achilles' heel in the anti-life lobby's campaign to get the United Nations to declare abortion to be a human right. That is why SPUC is developing the Amnesty for Babies campaign, so that legislators will declare that international law in fact protects the unborn from intentional killing from conception onwards.
Amnesty's 2009 report on the state of the world's human rights also contains attacks on other Latin American countries for restricting abortion. Amnesty's main concern would seem to be the provision of abortion for rape victims. That contradicts one of Amnesty's core principles: that the innocent should not be killed or punished. In what way does any unborn child, a member of the human family, deserve death? Amnesty should remind itself of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), article 6(5), which forbids the death penalty to be carried out on a pregnant woman. The covenant's travaux préparatoires (preparatory works) state that the express intention of this article was inspired by humanitarian considerations, and by consideration of the interests of the unborn child. Indeed, the innocent ought not to die with the guilty.
Amnesty must return to its core principles and reject the injustice of abortion.
