Human rights, one would assume, should apply to all human beings.
But not according to pro-abortion feminists.
In the name of “human rights,” Uma Mishra-Newbery of Women’s March Global (pictured) and Jaime Todd-Gher of Amnesty International argued that every country in the world should legalize abortions without restriction. Essentially, unborn babies should not have any human rights – even though they are fully human.
Writing in an op-ed for Time magazine, Mishra-Newbery and Todd-Gher asserted that abortion bans and restrictions “are designed to control and confine women and girls to stereotypical gender roles. They are an affront to their human rights and dignity and constitute gender discrimination.”
They used the tragic case of an abused Irish refugee to claim that women should be allowed to kill their unborn babies:
Organizations defending human rights have documented the agony and despair stemming from restrictive abortion laws around the world. One of the most harrowing stories is that of “Ms Y”, a woman who was granted asylum in Ireland after being beaten and raped by paramilitaries in her own country. Ms Y tried to kill herself several times when she was told she could not end her pregnancy, which was the result of rape. She was eventually forced to give birth by C-section. At every step of the way, the Irish authorities’ concern for the protection of the fetus trumped any consideration of Ms Y’s mental and physical health.
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They pitted the woman’s tragic circumstances against the life of her unborn child, as though the rights of both cannot be protected. But this is a false dichotomy. Abortions do not help women suffering from abuse or mental health problems. In many cases, studies show that killing an unborn baby can just make the mother’s suffering worse. Both women and unborn babies can and should be protected, because both are human beings. Prohibiting abortion does not put the unborn baby’s rights above the mother’s; it treats both as equal, valuable human beings.
Just as deceptive, the woman’s story makes readers think that Mishra-Newbery and Todd-Gher want to protect women’s health. But they really are just using it as a facade to gain sympathy and disguise their truly radical pro-abortion agenda.
Mishra-Newbery and Todd-Gher do not want to limit unborn babies’ rights just to protect the life or health of the mother, and they made that very clear later in their column.
“We must continue to stand up to governments’ efforts to control women’s and girls’ bodies,” they wrote. “According to the US-based reproductive health non-profit the Guttmacher Institute’s latest report, as of 2017, 42% of women of reproductive age live in the 125 countries where abortion is highly restricted (prohibited altogether, or allowed only to save a woman’s life or protect her health).”
What they really want is elective abortions, for any reason or no reason at all. The power to kill another living human being for convenience.
They continued:
Any person who does not control what happens to their body cannot be free. The debate around abortion should go beyond whether a person’s life is endangered by pregnancy. At the core of the issue is a person’s right to make decisions about what happens to their body. This right is critical to enabling all people who can get pregnant to fully exercise their human rights and to live their lives with dignity. Governments must not only decriminalize abortion and ensure access to safe abortion in practice, but also create social conditions in which people can make pregnancy-related decisions free of oppression, discrimination, stigma, coercion, violence, lack of opportunities or punishment.
Their argument for abortion as a human right is fatally flawed. It is well accepted in the scientific community that unborn babies are living, unique human beings from the moment of conception. Abortions kill human beings in the womb, that is their very purpose. Destroying another human being’s rights is not a cause to be championed. It is a despicable form of discrimination and should be recognized as such.
