Youth Blog

Unfortunately, day two and three of events here at the United Nations have still been replete with anti-life sympathies. Sometimes, these thoughts and ideas are expressed blatantly without any reservations. At other times, their acceptability is simply assumed and the spectators are expected to follow along. An emergent theme that our team has recognized over and over again is the assurance that behind every message, there is another. What at first appears as a reasonable statement or goal, if pushed further, almost always includes some sort of right to abortion. The problem that our team then faces is that most of the time, no one talks about the issue of abortion directly; it is simply accepted as the presupposition of not only the speaker, but of everyone in the room. Our job then becomes all the more urgent. It is at this point that we feel compelled to do the uncomfortable thing and challenge the speakers on the assumptions that they are making.

For instance, at an event titled, “Advancing gender equality & SRHR: the role of National Human Rights Institutions,” one of our team members asked how abortion can be considered a way to advance gender equality and human rights when the destruction of an innocent human being is, in fact, a human rights violation. The moderator initially tried to prevent the panelists from answering. She asserted, falsely, that abortion hadn’t been talked about as a right, even though one panelist talked about launching a court case to expand access to abortion in Northern Ireland, another referenced “unsafe abortions,” another stated that he wanted to ensure that “every child is wanted,” and there were many references to “SRHR”—sexual and reproductive health and rights—and “reproductive justice/health,” often understood to include abortion.