United Nations Petition Against Abortion Re-Launched, Seeks 1 Million Signers
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
October 21, 2009
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) — A coalition of pro-life organizations throughout the world have re-launched their effort to collect 1 million signatures for the Petition for the Unborn Child. The document supports the right to life of unborn children from global attacks launched by groups that want to create an international right to abortion.
Groups from the United States, Poland, Spain and other European counties launched the petition last fall and gathered nearly 500,000 signatures for it.
The signatures were presented to various ambassadors a the United Nations and at a UN press conference that was broadcast throughout UN headquarters.
The groups included American pro-life groups C-FAM, Concerned Women for America, United Families International and the Polish Federation of Pro-life Groups and the Spanish Institute for Family Policy.
"The purpose of the petition is to persuade UN member states to begin interpreting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as protecting the unborn child from abortion and also to recognize traditional marriage and the right of parents to educate their children," CFAM president Austin Ruse explained in the latest edition of his group’s Friday Fax newsletter.
Ruse said organizers "launched the petition partially in reaction to efforts by pro-abortion groups last year to use the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration to promote a right to abortion."
The pro-life petition can be signed in any one of 19 languages that most people across the globe use and it specifically references portions of the Universal Declaration that advance pro-life principles.
The Universal Declaration says “Everyone has the right to life.”
"Though it is not clear that the drafters meant to include the unborn child in this formulation, States may interpret the document this way," Ruse writes in the Friday Fax.
Ruse says the backers of the petition were inspired by other international petitions that have shown tremendous success.
"Organizers were also inspired by efforts of the Catholic St. Egidio Community of Rome who gathered one million signatures calling for a moratorium on the death penalty that resulted in a successful UN resolution calling for a ban on executions," he said.
European Union Parliamentarians Anna Zaborska of Slovakia and Carlo Casini of Italy led similar efforts to the UN pro-life petition in Europe. Their petitions were presented to the European Parliament last year.
Related web sites:
Sign the petition at https://www.c-fam.org/campaigns/lid.2/default.asp
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