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Globalizing the Culture of Life
By John Klink
John Klink was a member of the Holy See delegation at the United Nations during the 1990s and, since 2000, has occasionally been on the US delegation to the UN. He gave this talk to a pro-life congress organised by the Pontifical Council for the Family in Peru in November 2005.
I would first like to express my sincere thanks to Dr. Fernando Carbone and all of those who have helped to organize this Pro-Life Congress for the kind invitation to participate and for the particular honor of being the first to address this august group.
I have been asked to speak to you today about globalizing the culture of life. In thinking about this extraordinarily important topic, we need to come to terms with what exactly do we mean by the "culture of life"? I mean, aren't most cultures "cultures of life"? I believe, for instance, that environmentalists would think of themselves as ardent supporters of "life", as well as would most animal rights activists.
Have you noticed that pro-abortion advocates generally seek to take a life-defensive approach: that is, they argue that they are protecting women's lives? As I will mention later, the first problem is that that assumption is being proven scientifically incorrect since, in even developed countries where access to abortions is unfettered, maternal mortality and morbidity is on the rise. The more fundamental problem, of course, is that pro-abortion advocates simply refuse to acknowledge that the tiny life that abortion brutally terminates is of a human being--and even worse, a defenseless human being--and worse still--a human child terminated at the behest of its own mother.
So, again, what is the culture of life? As heirs of Adam and Eve, our nature should allow us to fully participate in life's potential glories. We awaken each morning, we give thanks, we explore and contribute to our respective worlds, and revel in the good that God has shared with us. It is this absolute wonder at the Creator's gift of life that is our inheritance that we as parents must instill in our children and our grandchildren.
Yet we all also know the tragic dénouement of Adam and Eve's inheritance. At a certain point, this idyll of the garden of Eden is shattered. Adam and Eve as representative of collective man and collective woman come to know good and evil. And our inheritance becomes tainted and greatly diminished. Death becomes an essential part of our human reality.
Each generation reflects on what has become for it the knowledge of good and evil that effectively changes everything: The knowledge that we would probably have wanted never to have. The knowledge that takes away at least part of our innocence.
Yet one message is clear from the book of Genesis: woman and man are the one creature God chose to make in His own image. The desire for the realization of the potentiality of the garden of Eden and perfect intimacy with God becomes all too often, through the experience of this knowledge of evil, an aching longing rather than a joyous reality.
And so we come to the issue of what new knowledge, what perhaps unexpected temptation becomes the temptation of the newest generation--the temptation that is ever different and ever the same that leads mankind to an ever-expanding fissure that impedes our full reunion with God and His plan.
Even the most cursory reading of history, that which continually is found repeated from generation to generation is a culture of war--an insatiable appetite for conquest, an attempted "righting" of purported wrongs, and a repetition of claims of inheritance of fiefdoms of king after king and prince after prince, noble after noble--of family inheritance, of blood lines, of the divine rights and nations' grudges and jealousies of other nations.
What was remarkable throughout these variegated episodes from history is that codes of ethics were recognized, such as the chivalric codes of knighthood which respected human dignity, even if they did not always prevail. When societal codes prove insufficient, men and women cannot escape from those achingly lonely moments of self-reflection much like Adam and Eve following their fall who tried unsuccessfully to hide from the face of God who anxiously called after them.
As we fast forward to more recent histories of mankind's loss of innocence, we encounter the failed ideologies of Hitler's fascism or Lenin and Stalin's communism which began not simply to teach, but to act, at every violent instance, on a vision of man wherein human dignity mattered not at all. The major lesson learned from our "victorious" post-WWII and post-Soviet empire generation is that these landmark blights on history's recent past of man's inhumanity to man should never be allowed to be repeated. This is a knowledge of an evil so incomparable in its completeness that it has been etched in stone on our social consciousness.
Should our culture not recognize and remember the error of its ways, these intoxicating but deadly "apples" of denial of human dignity, might be chosen again and again.
And so, we have reached the new millennium with vastly improved economic conditions for many, and we have had the experience of the aspirations and expectations that come from new democratization--and many can now claim to begin to be in charge of their own destinies rather than pawns of warring kings. So now in what direction is our recently liberated culture headed? Now that there are fewer formal wars--at least in the western world where Europe, for instance, has remarkably avoided being embroiled in its past patterns of internecine conflicts for a number of decades. Are we now somehow past mankind's temptations? Or is there a new cause for concern?
As we can sense, all is not well when now the greatest numbers of victims of violence are not those who die in war, but instead those that cannot even speak to defend themselves such as the unborn or the mute such as Terri Schiavo. And, as in ancient times, it is the holiest of men and women whose prophetic antennae are so fine-tuned to their culture's future directional choices who sound the cultural warning trumpets and the alarm bells to waken an indolent people.
As providence would have it, I have had the great honor in my life to work respectively with and for two almost undoubtedly soon-to-be-proclaimed saints of the modern day: Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II. In retrospect it is intriguing to see the commonality of vision and prophetic concerns of these two great spiritual and historical figures who have only recently ended their earthly labors.
As a director of Catholic Relief Services, I worked with now Blessed Theresa on her various initiatives in Rome, and then in the Yemen Arab Republic. Mother had begun, amongst other projects, the first leprosarium in the Yemen Arab Republic, and was working with the mentally ill and with orphans in that very undeveloped country. All represented pieces of the human mosaic whose needs had never been addressed. I recall particularly the home for the clinically insane in the Red Sea town of Hodeidah where the "patients" were fettered with balls and chains. At the time, even Mother was unable to convince the authorities to unshackle the clinically insane. And so, in her inimitable way, she nevertheless addressed their essential humanity. As with her homes for the dying in India, she instructed her sisters to bathe the patients. And here she added that each patient should be given a living plant unto their care.
I remember these patients being released from their dark and sweltering dirt -floored dungeons, dank with human excrement, making an immediate, lumbering bee line to their respective plants with a can of water in hand when once a day they were allowed in the open air--each patient still dragging by his shackled legs his respective ball and heavy, clanking chain. Amazingly, although Catholic Relief Services had various highly unsuccessful projects aimed at getting anything to grow in this Tihama Desert area, where temperatures ranged to 130 degrees Fahrenheit and 100% humidity, the only place in Hodeidah where one could be assured that one could see living plants was at this facility for the insane. Life flourished where one would least expect it.
Mother could never be accused of ever having ignored the plight of the poor and afflicted who, for her, provided an actual daily access to Christ Himself. All of Mother's lifelong concerns can be seen to be borne of a conviction of an abiding respect for human life, no matter how small, marginalized, or near to death. And thus, it is noteworthy to remember her greatest concern. Blessed Theresa unambiguously at every opportunity told all who would listen, and many who would not that the greatest threat to peace in the modern world was abortion.
Her focus was not solely on the plight of the unborn, whose lives would be snuffed out before they had been able to see light or even breathe the fresh air of day, but for the deleterious effects of abortion on women in particular, and on society as a whole. Mother felt that the reversal of woman's natural, intuitive tendencies to protect and nourish her children, born and unborn through not only the horrendous act of termination of pregnancy itself, but also advocacy for a new "right" to take unborn life, would lead automatically to a diminution of the value of human life at every stage of the life cycle. Thus, she recognized in her prophetic vision, through the ever-increasing incidence of abortion, peace within the family would be gravely damaged, the role of the family as the natural unit of society would be undermined, and the unbalancing of the natural order would result in further global destabilization.
Mother in turn took courage and inspiration from her good friend, mentor and Holy Father, Pope John Paul the Great who, like Mother, had experienced the dehumanization of communism. I was greatly honored to have been at Mother's beatification by this great pope and the intimacy of the moment was extraordinary, reminiscent for me of the historic relationship of Saints Francis and Clare. Together like the two famous saints of Assisi, these two modern giants of the human race had preached from their respective "pulpits" to the world at large, their message of hope and resolve: Do not be afraid! But their further prophetic message was: "Do not for a moment mistake the real and present danger. Be aware that the danger far greater than poverty is that of giving higher priority to wealth and self aggrandizement or even to the nobler politically correct goals of protection of the environment or animals previously mentioned than to the protection of the life that mirrors God Himself - the life of human beings in all its stages.
This great, proudly Polish man who had lived through both Nazism and Soviet communism was not about to allow himself or his now global flock to be released from one bondage only to be immediately captured by another. For mankind to be truly free, it needs to understand the new insidious danger of a creeping cultural trap: the newest apple in the garden of Eden, if you will: the "apple" of the culture of death that in our day threatens to eclipse the culture of life.
John Paul taught that the only hope for those simple mortals who find themselves faced with this new, perhaps greatest temptation is Christ Himself who became Man precisely in order to break the bonds of death once and for all and restore our original inheritance of our biblical first parents.
While I had strong feelings about the culture of life inculcating by osmosis from my Mother an intrinsic respect for life and for family, I was largely unaware of the enormity of the on-going global battle regarding abortion until I was asked by the Holy See to assist them as a Vatican diplomat delegate at the United Nations. My mentor and friend, then-archbishop, and now Cardinal, Martino whom I had met when we worked together in Thailand, asked me to assist him in his new appointment as permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations. I don't know if any of you have been asked by your local pastor to "help out" and you suddenly find weeks or months later that the job was a bit bigger than you had anticipated. Well, my "helping out" at the United Nations lasted some 16 years but, as you can imagine, it was more than fascinating.
To understand current developments related to the culture of life vs. the culture of death on a global level, I believe it is essential to briefly review the impact of the United Nations on this international debate.
Added to the momentous political developments of the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the European Union was a conscious fight for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the world using the international forum of the United Nations as its centerpiece and its engine.
My first experience of UN global diplomacy in action was the World Summit for Children where commitments were made by a meeting of 70-odd heads of state or government for the betterment of the world's children. Happily, at both the Child Summit in 1990 and at the Eco Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, following intensive negotiations, the Holy See was able to join consensus without needing to make any official reservations or statements of interpretation
However supportive the Holy See was, and is, of some of the United Nations roles as a potential promoter of peace and social justice, Pope John Paul himself became personally alarmed when he read the draft of the plan of action for the up-coming Cairo Population Conference in March of 1994. The Pope felt compelled to write an unprecedented personal letter to Dr Sadik, then the director of UNFPA, and to every head of state to underline his concerns. In that letter the Pope stated that the Holy See "is fully aware of the complexity of the issues involved" in any discussion of population and development, but that "This very complexity requires that we carefully weigh the consequences for the present and future generations of the strategies and recommendations to be proposed. In this context, the draft final document of the Cairo Conference, which is already being circulated, is a cause of grave concern to me".
He stated unambiguously that "certain basic ethical principles are contradicted by its proposals" and that "Political or ideological considerations cannot be, by themselves, the basis on which essential decisions for the future of our society are founded. What is at stake here is the very future of humanity. Fundamental questions like the transmission of life, the family, and the material and moral development of society, need very serious consideration."
As examples, Pope John Paul cites the fact that "the international consensus of the 1984 Mexico City International Conference on Population that "in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning" is completely ignored in the draft document. Indeed, there is a tendency to promote an internationally recognized right to access to abortion on demand, without any restriction, with no regard to the rights of the unborn, in a manner which goes beyond what even now is unfortunately accepted by the laws of some nations. The vision of sexuality which inspires the document is individualistic. Marriage is ignored, as if it were something of the past. An institution as natural, universal and fundamental as the family cannot be manipulated without causing serious damage to the fabric and stability of society." [Letter of Pope John Paul II to Dr. Nafis Sadik, March 19, 1994]
Despite the Holy Father's efforts which prevented an international right to abortion, the resultant document was nevertheless badly flawed, and, unfortunately, the attempted use of the United Nations for the promotion of the culture of death did not end at Cairo. In 1995 the Bejing Women's Conference promoted the same individualistic vision, and at both Cairo and Beijing, unlike at the Child Summit and the Rio Eco Summit, the Holy See felt compelled to clearly enunciate its strong written reservations to the final texts. Similar reservations were filed by scores of countries, including a large preponderance of Latin American nations who rightly felt that the flawed language of the outcome document challenged their sovereign constitutions as regards the right to life.
In the Cairo document, the Holy Father's concerns that the previous Population Conference's dictum that "in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning" was finally adopted due to the hard negotiations of the Holy See and its allies. However, this was to become a pyrrhic victory when the opposition simply changed the rubric in order to be able to continue its pro-abortion goals. Suddenly the term "family planning" came to be used far less frequently.. Rather, a new term "reproductive health" and "reproductive health services" was coined in order to paint with a broader brush and to be able to invent a new name for amongst many other things, abortion, which like the hydra, has seemingly innumerable heads. And in this manner, the pro-abortion advocates began to effectively evade the prohibitions previously, and currently, put in place against abortion. Thus, rather than as a method of family planning, abortion began to be promoted at the United Nations and elsewhere as part and parcel of "reproductive health".
Cardinal Martino, who headed the Holy See delegation to Cairo, was scolded by the chairman of the conference for being concerned about the precise wording of the document since in the words of the chairman: "they are only words," and "they have no legal, binding effect."
Well, as we all know, for Christians words do have significant meaning since Christ Himself allowed Himself to become the Word made Flesh. But the secret that the chairman was not about to reveal was that every word of the Cairo Platform for Action and the subsequent outcome document of the Beijing Conference, where I was again honored to be part of the Holy See delegation, were to become the new mantra of the international pro-abortion advocates. Further, they were to argue ceaselessly going forward as if the so-called international consensus documents of Cairo, Beijing and subsequent world conferences were legally binding documents and actually constituted international law. Further, the word "consensus" is highly misleading since 47 countries made reservations or interpretive statements at Cairo, and 64 made them at Beijing.
However, although these documents are not legally binding, the opposition makes no secret of their intent to use these and other UN instruments to attempt to establish abortion as an enforceable human right worldwide through customary international law, thus bypassing sovereignty and the democratic process. Unlike treaty law, customary international law can be binding on the nations of the world even if those nations do not formally consent to be bound by that law. Some scholars of international law argue that mere repetition of language from international conferences to which states give their approval is one way this can occur.
Some significant political developments which led to these historical maneuverings are worthy of note. But before elaborating them I would like to note for the record that I am not only an American citizen, but an Irish, and therefore European citizen as well:
1. It is not coincidental IN MY OPINION, that the rise of the European Union has been concomitant with this radical shift in international social policy. While individual European states had hitherto been strong defenders of their national historic commitment to family stability (many still have the natural family enshrined in their constitutions), and while the EU's original raison d'etre was by nature related to economic solidarity issues, from about 1990 onwards there was a decided shift towards required adherence to new "progressive" social norms.
2. In line with this, the individual voices of EU states were replaced by the voice of the revolving Presidency. Thus, ironically, as I previously noted, some states emerged briefly to find their individual voice following decades of Soviet dominance, their voices were again effectively silenced upon their joining the European Union. Each of these EU states must join in consensus with their fellow EU countries and legitimate economic interests--the original reason for the EU--now became only a part of the scope of EU interests with a new anti-life and anti-traditional family social agenda being relentlessly pursued as de rigueur for EU member states, and from there, for the rest of the world. Historic national cultural interests had suddenly given way to submission to extraordinary peer pressure based on economic ambitions.
3. During the Clinton administration, the EU's strong pro-abortion and anti-traditional family bias was shared, resulting in an enormous push to "globalize" this agenda. This alliance was enormously successful in promoting one world conference after another whose purpose was to inexorably "push the envelope" of this new anti-family agenda on the global stage.
4. It is interesting to note that since the US election of 2000, and the rupture of this EU/US anti-life partnership by the pro-life and pro-family policies of the Bush administration, no previously unscheduled world conferences have been organized. The Bush administration made clear at the UN within 10 days of its assuming power that its agenda at the UN would be pro-life, pro-family, pro-abstinence for unmarried adolescents and strongly supportive of parental rights. This put as we say a "monkey wrench" in the plans of the promoters of the culture of death. This, long before the Iraqi conflict was on the horizon, began the cacophony of voices accusing the US of unilateralism, so great was the opposition's dismay that their anti-life and anti-family efforts had met a roadblock.
5. However, it should be noted that the United States on its own represents only a fraction of the voting power of the European Union at the UN General Assembly and at world conferences. Ironically the US, composed of 50 large states has one solitary vote, while the EU which now speaks with only one voice on most social issues has 25 votes and is seeking yet another for the EU organization itself.. Thus, any agenda that the US promotes at the UN is quickly labeled to be "unilateralist" or "isolationist" if it is in disagreement with the EU, and particularly with the EU's pro-abortion agenda.
6. The Holy See during Cairo and Beijing enjoyed the support of a multitude of Latin American and Arab states and was able to largely "hold the line". In the interim, the opposition has organized a variety of well-orchestrated attacks on the culture of life throughout the world, a great part of which has been focused on Latin America since most Latin American states continue to defend life in their laws and constitutions from the moment of conception.
Thus, let's have a look at some of the methods being used to attack the culture of life in Latin America:
1. European Union donor countries, for instance, have used the threat of a diminution or halt of its foreign assistance to developing countries, to force countries to pursue its anti-life or anti-traditional family agenda. They were successful, for instance in removing the minister of the family in one central American country who was fired when its president received a letter from five EU ambassadors threatening to withdraw their foreign assistance should the minister continue his insistence on defining "gender" in the old fashioned way as male and female. [The predominant EU understanding of gender is to consider it to be a "social construct" that is really up to individual decision--and thus should not be limited by biological sex identification.]
2. The most dangerous and fallacious tool of the opposition is to blatantly misinterpret these UN conference documents, particularly the Cairo and Beijing documents as if they established abortion as a human right and using them to promote abortion and to pressure countries to increase access to or to make abortion legal. This is being done by UN Treaty Compliance Committees such as the Committee for the Convention on all forms of Discrimination Against Women, Human Rights Committees (Geneva), as well as UN agencies such as the UNFPA, and such prominent NGOs as the International Planned Parenthood Ferderation, the International Women's Health Coalition and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
To enforce this view, UN treaty compliance committees have issued reports demanding that individual sovereign states change their national legislation or even their constitutions so as to legalize abortion.
Some of these recent attacks include attacks against Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, and to bring it close to home, also Peru. Perhaps the admonition to Mexico is the most chilling: "all states of Mexico should review their legislations so that, where necessary, women are granted access to rapid and easy abortion." I can think of few more apt descriptors of the onslaught of the modern culture of death: rapid and easy.
What is particularly insidious about these attacks is the UN treaties, including the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, don't even mention abortion and that even the worst language of Cairo and Beijing and other conferences states only that "Any measures or changes related to abortion within the health system can only be determined at the national or local level according to the national legislative process. In circumstances where abortion is not against the law, such abortion should be safe." That is, the United Nations cannot dictate to sovereign nations what their laws should or should not be as regards abortion, since abortion has never been considered by even the most far reaching of the UN world conference documents as an international human right. Further, how can any human rights body approve or promote the violation of the most fundamental of human rights--the right in essence to have rights--the right to life of the most innocent and helpless humans? Yet similar and multiple attacks against sovereign states have been issued by the UN Committee on Human Rights and other UN human rights committees such as the International Committee on the Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the International Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights.
Apart from official UN committees, other action arms of the United Nations such as UNFPA have helped to sponsor television programmes such as Barra de Mujeres here in Peru which went on the attack against Dr Carbone, the leader of this Pro-Life Congress when he was minister of health. In this television programme those whose views were not in agreement with the anti-life "politically correct" views on human rights were placed in a "garbage room", whereas politicians espousing the politically correct views were placed in the "sanity room". I am told that what was defined as being "sane" is a liberalization of laws relating to approved contraceptive methods and oral emergency contraception. One cannot help but demand what right a UN agency such as UNFPA has to even partially fund programmes aimed at an infantile demonizing of a high government official of a sovereign state.
Similarly, non governmental organizations funded by a variety of abortion rights groups such as International Planned Parenthood Federation, the International Women's Health Coalition, and, as noted above, UNFPA, are all seeking to change your culture of life, not through democratic means. Rather, their intent is to do their pro-abortion colonialization through judicial action. Remember that this is the way that abortion was finally legalized in the United States in the infamous decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade.
One such attempt is currently being made in Columbia by Monica Roa, the Director of Gender Justice at New York University. Ms Roa is very open about her strategy wherein she is enlisting different groups to help her frame the debate for the court and in the media. "We are working as an acting group that is doing a theater play. We all have different roles," Roa has explained. For instance, in this pre-orchestrated media campaign she arranges for academics and prominent lawyers to submit amicus briefs. But she even pre-organizes part of her own opposition--arranging to have a liberal lawyer friend castigate her legal challenge publicly for not being radical enough.
"We are great friends", Roa says. "I think she will be great at it. She keeps calling me to tell me that she has a better way to insult me in public and I say great!" Roa indicates that she is choreographing her role even as to how she dresses, thus playing down her normal stylishness, and wears simple pearls so as to look to her Colombian media audience as a "good girl." In this way one person in New York with the backing of New York radical feminists would seek to manipulate the legal system of an entire country, and seek to obliterate its historic constitutional defense of human life from the moment of conception.
Similarly, in order to counter the opposition of the Catholic Church, organizations such as Catholics for a Free Choice are actively seeking to give the impression that they represent a real popular movement. In point of fact, Catholics for Free Choice are funded by US based foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Sunnen Foundation (a pioneer in the contraceptive industry), the Packard Foundation of Los Altos, California, that has provided millions of dollars to organizations promoting abortion, sterilization, and population control as well as by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation. All of these foundations see CFFC as a convenient vehicle for undermining Church teaching and colonizing their culture of death. It is important to reveal such organizations for what they are. Often, they are so extreme that they discredit themselves.
Last year I was at a Population Conference in Puerto Rico, for instance, when Catholics for Free Choice actually had the audacity to distribute supposed Catholic Prayer cards of the Virgin Mary the patron saint of the Americas, and of the pro-life movement with a prayer written boldly over her sacred image calling for the Blessed Mother's help in legalizing abortion. Even many of the hardest hearted were scandalized by this sacrilege to the icon of the Americas.
So what can we expect? The most immediate legal challenges will include a push for "reproductive health", for "sex education", for the so-called "morning after pill", for changes in abortion laws beginning with case of rape and incest. and escalating from there to abortion on demand. . In this regard, it is imperative that any use of the term "reproductive health" have a clear definition in a UN negotiated document that this term does not include a right to abortion or cannot be used to promote access to abortion. For this reason, the term "maternal and child health" which for decades was the nomenclature used to describe efforts aimed at a decrease in maternal mortality should still be used. The women of Latin America deserve basic health care in all its forms, health care that can assure them healthy lives and healthy deliveries rather than "quick and easy" termination of their unborn children.
Sadly, since the Cairo Population Conference focus began on Reproductive Health, maternal mortality has increased, not declined. The WHO tells us that there has been no substantial decrease in maternal mortality. In fact, in some cases, it has increased. Just last week, at an NGO Sponsored UN meeting, it was reported by Dr Adiel Fleischer (Chief of Maternal Fetal Medicine and Associate Chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at North Shore Hospital, Manhasset, NY) that the maternal mortality has increased, not decreased in New York, which has had legalized abortion since 1970. By way of contrast, it should be noted that Ireland, where abortion is not legal, has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. Similarly, "sex education" components should first be subject to parental scrutiny and parental veto since they can contain specific instruction promoting homosexual acts or lifestyle.
And, finally, with the realization of the stakes involved, and the degree to which the culture of life is under attack, particularly here in Latin America which has been its bastion, what do we do?
First and foremost, as I mentioned at the outset, continually promote the culture of life within your individual families. The wonderment for God's creation of life begins in the family. Your children who know family love and responsibility will be the greatest defenders of the culture of life.
Secondly, in your communities, do not allow for the "politically correct" to hold sway. Never allow yourselves to be intimidated to defend the protection of life. Whether they will ever admit it, people will respect your position, and most importantly, they will know that there are many defenders of the unborn and of basic family values.
Thirdly, question at every opportunity what public officials are doing to protect life. And for goodness sake, thank those courageous pro-life politicians who are fighting for life every day like those who hosted the press conference today at the Palace of Congress. You must thus be kept informed on a daily or at minimum a weekly basis as to what initiatives are at hand--both of the opposition which must be countered, or to ensure, for instance, that women who are alone and pregnant do have the support they need throughout their pregnancy and afterwards. Networking is thus imperative, through life networks with internet sites and weekly internet alerts, and through Church organizations. If you find that a pro-life organization does not exist in your community, don't be shy--start one!
There are great leadership examples which all can take to heart. For example, the case of Julia Cardenal in El Salvador, who began tying to stop an expansion of the decriminalization of abortion and ended up successfully amending the constitution to protect life from the moment of conception.. Similarly, Elida Solorzano from Nicaragua, and Martha and Leonardo Casco from Honduras who bravely and successfully sought to be leaders in their respective country's official delegations to Cairo and Beijing and other conferences. Despite all odds, the presence and effective action of these individuals literally held and hold the dam against the forces of the culture of death. Without their presence, their support, their voice crying in the desert, which in turn provided courage for other delegations to do the same, I am convinced that there would already be an international right to abortion. Find out what is going on at the United Nations and lobby long and hard to have strong pro-life and pro-family delegates lead your respective country's delegation. Similarly, make sure that your country's permanent delegations to the UN have standing instructions to defend life and the family. It is vitally important that your countries reiterate the reservations they made at the time of the adoption of the Cairo, Beijing and other conference documents whenever references are made to these documents, and to resist attempts to reaffirm these documents unequivocally. However, that is not enough.
It is essential that your country insist on putting clarifying language into all new UN negotiated documents stating that none of these documents or language from these documents related to sexual and/or reproductive health and/or rights create any new international human rights and cannot be interpreted to include a right to abortion or justify the promotion of abortion. So these documents can no longer be misconstrued to promote abortion as a fundamental human right without clarifying language excluding abortion, even if your country reiterates its reservations, they could be contributing to the possible establishment of customary international law, thereby seeking to bypass national sovereignty and interpret abortion as an international human right.
This is particularly important because there is a clear and present danger that, unless language relating to reproductive health is clearly defined to exclude abortion, it could be used to establish hard international law making abortion an international human right. This is not conjecture.
There is a current attempt to use the proposed Disability Convention, which is in the process of being negotiated at the United Nations, to establish abortion as a human right. The proposed Disability Convention will be a legally binding treaty.and is on a fast track for agreement next year. . As I said before, no present UN Treaty even mentions abortion. Should the language relating to sexual and reproductive health, as it is currently proposed, remain in the document without excluding abortion, this would be the first time that any language which could be construed to approve or promote the violation of a fundamental human right, the right to life, would appear in any legally binding UN document. In addition, there is a serious danger that this sympathetic treaty could be used to establish a right to euthanasia.
All proponents of the culture of life must take action now to prevent this catastrophe.
Naturally, do not take no for an answer when it comes to the defense of life in your own countries. The difference, for instance, of the leadership in the United States between the pro-abortion politics of President Clinton, and the pro-life policies of President Bush is night and day. Simply hearing the President and other leaders of your country speak of the Culture of Life on a regular basis provides an enormous impetus and reinvigoration of the culture. It changes the very definition of political correctness. Thus, ask your representatives in congress, your senators what they are doing to promote life. At his Congress I am honored for instance to be together with Chris and Marie Smith who are the quintessential pro-life leaders of the United States, Chris in the US Congress and Marie who leads Feminists for Life. In your governments, do not allow Ministries of the Family to become Gender ministries whose focus becomes singularly radically feminist rather than promoting and assisting both parents in their difficult, but essential role. In this regard, it is important to include programmes aimed at the elimination of abuse in the family. But just because abuse does exist--and it exists in cases of co-habitation without marriage as well--it is even more indicative of the need to concretely help families, not ignore or eliminate them. In those cases where women's ministries or sections do exist, seek to ensure that pro-life women are appointed to head them.
Lastly, seek to influence the media in your countries. While I would not agree with Fox News in the United States on every topic, since it has come into existence, it has provided a clear alternative to the other often radically liberal viewpoints of the other news providers. At minimum it has sparked a healthy debate. As we are all aware, the media has become the new "pulpit" for the modern world and we must use it to preserve and promote the Culture of Life.
Several days ago, Pope Benedict XVI received in audience a delegation of politicians from his homeland of Bavaria. In the Holy Father 's remarks we can see the importance he places on our topic:
"Undoubtedly
the difficult social and economic challenges of our time occupy your attention
in a particular way. To these are added those increasingly complicated
questions of the new scientific and technological developments, in the face of
which those who must make decisions at the political level feel themselves
questioned," he continued.
"The progress of science can be both a blessing as well as a ruin. Men and
women, who are conscious of their responsibility before God, Giver of life,
will do everything possible so that the inviolable dignity of man, whose life
is sacred in each of its phases, determines the application of new scientific
knowledge,"
