A law professor at Princeton University has criticised a UN committee for claiming that abortion and assisted suicide are human rights that should be protected.
The ‘General Comment’ on the right to life from the United Nations Human Rights Committee argues for abortion to be legalised around the world.
Professor Robert George said it abandoned moral reasoning.
Victims
The document, issued at the end of October, included a call to remove all barriers to abortion including those “caused as a result of the exercise of conscientious objection by individual medical providers”.
General Comments are not legally binding but can be taken into consideration by national courts.
But Professor George said that the committee’s comments fail to acknowledge that every abortion has a victim.
“It’s clear in the case of abortion that abortion takes the life of an innocent child in the womb. There is a victim. There is a third party.”
Opposing ‘evil’
The professor also dismissed the committee’s notion that “robust” legal safeguards could be put in place for assisted suicide to protect vulnerable people from abuse.
He said: “Even with euthanasia, we know that when a regime of medicalized killing is unleashed in society, it’s not simply the people who wish to be killed who end up being killed.”
He concluded by calling on people to oppose the “evil” move to recognise abortion and euthanasia as human rights.