Mary Robinson (pictured), the pro-abortion campaigner, lawyer, and politician, and Ireland's first female president, is one of 16 recipients of Barack Obama's 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour. The White House says of the 16 recipients: "Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way."
Mary Robinson's citation reads: "Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Since 2002, she has been the President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative."
The website "Realising Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative" carries a Guardian newspaper biographical article about Mary Robinson under the insulting headline "Hail Mary". It states: " ... you have to start with the fact that this is the woman who, at 24, became the youngest-ever member of the Irish Senate. For years, as a practising lawyer, she fought deeply unpopular battles: legalising abortion and contraception, decriminalising divorce and homosexuality, both of which she took all the way to the European Court of Human Rights ... "
In 2007, Mary Robinson was honorary co-chairman of the Women Deliver Conference in London, which had the stated objective of of addressing Millennium Development Goal 5 to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity. Afterwards, a pro-women coalition of 14 international organizations complained that the dominance of a pro-abortion agenda resulted in the conference failing to achieve its objective, stating:
"Regrettably, the conference agenda was so preoccupied with promoting the ideology and practice of abortion that the genuine healthcare needs of women and children were virtually ignored in the plenary sessions and overwhelmed in the panel discussions."
Mary Robinson is also a signatory to the infamous Yogyakarta principles which, amongst other things, called on States to "ensure that all sexual and reproductive health, education, prevention, care and treatment programmes and services respect the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities, and are equally available to all without discrimination"; according to the World Health Organisation's definition "sexual and reproductive health" services includes the provision of abortion on demand.
"A brief commentary on the Yogyakarta Principles" by Jakob Cornides a lawyer and writer on human rights, explains that the Yogyakarta Principles were adopted in 2007 by a self-styled ‘International Panel of Experts in International Human Rights Law and on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’.
An abstract summarising Mr Cornides' paper warns: "While the comments presented in [Mr Cornides'] paper mainly concern the substance of the Yogyakarta Principles, it should be noted that the way in which these Principles came into being provides even greater reason for concern: this is a deliberate attempt to manipulate our understanding of ‘Human Rights’ in order to promote the self-serving social agenda of a small cluster of vociferous and politically well-connected advocacy groups.
No wonder she appealed to President Barack Obama who, through his anti-life/anti-family agenda is seeking to undermine, worldwide, the law upholding the sanctity of human life and the family, founded on the marriage of a man and a woman, as leading scholar Monsignor Michel Schooyans pointed out during a recent Vatican conference.
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