‘Abortion is not a human right,’ the US Ambassador to the United Nations has told the intergovernmental organisation.
In May the pro-abortion UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls and two UN Special Rapporteurs had accused a number of US states of “manipulating the COVID-19 crisis” to restrict essential access to abortions.
But Ambassador Andrew Bremberg called these criticisms “bizarre and inexplicable” and said the US “categorically rejects this transparent attempt to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to assert the existence of such a right”.
No such right
Bremberg, who has been Ambassador since October 2019, reminded the UN that “international human rights law does not recognise any ‘right to abortion’”.
He added: “One of the reasons that the United States and others increasingly see the UN’s human rights system as utterly broken is the tendency of its self-appointed guardians to label certain policy preferences as ‘rights’.”
transparent attempt to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic
He described the allegations that had been made against US states as a ‘waste of UN time and resources’.
Assurances
Earlier this year the Acting Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) sent a letter to the UN raising concerns about its healthcare priorities during the pandemic.
On behalf of the US administration, the USAID Administrator urged the UN not to use the “crisis as an opportunity to advance access to abortion as an ‘essential service’”.
In reply, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres claimed: “the United Nations does not intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State”.
COVID-19: UN criticised for promoting abortion as an ‘essential service’