Abortion as International Aid

As expected, President Obama, in the first three days of office, reversed the Mexico City Policy which banned funding for NGOs that provide for and advocate abortion.  Although he signed the executive order late Friday, and not on the day of the March for Life,  this is no reason for reassurance, as Deacon Scott Dodge points out.

Well, it looked a lot like politics as usual today with President Obama's signing of an Executive Order that reversed what is known as the Mexico City Policy. It is called this because President Reagan announced it in a speech he gave in 1984 at the U.N. International Conference on Population held in Mexico City. The Mexico City policy stipulates that no monies given by the U.S. government to foreign NGOs can be used to fund abortions or abortion-related services. The rule also prevents foreign NGOs that receive U.S. money from presenting abortion as a possibility to the women they seek to serve. Hence, the policy is known by proponents of abortion-on-demand as "the global gag rule".

It is important to point out that the policy does not extend to NGOs based in the United States because such a denial has been determined to be unconstitutional. The Mexico City policy was in force from 1984 until the first few days of the first Clinton Administration, when then-President Clinton overturned it by another Executive Order issued on 22 January 1993, the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's unfortunate Roe vs. Wade decision. The Mexico City policy was once again put into effect with yet another Executive Order signed by Pres. Bush on 22 January 2001.

I gave a hearty guffaw to the idea put forward by a reporter for NPR, which she no doubt received from the White House Press Office, that by not reversing the Mexico City policy on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, Pres. Obama sought to de-politicize the issue. Wow! That is spin at its worst and least creative and most disingenuous. I agree with Ashley Horne from Focus on the Family that it is not possible to "reduce abortions by channelling more money to the abortion industry". What do we offer the world? Abortion on demand! Who does this offend? All traditional cultures. The gap widens. Besides, the right to life is not a political issue, it is not an ethical issue, it is a fundamental moral issue.

What it means is that the NGOs which promote the dignity of the person will be replaced by those advocating for (e.g. asserting political pressure) and providing abortion services as a means of relieving poverty in the world. Obama stated: "For the past eight years, they have undermined efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries... For these reasons, it is right for us to rescind this policy and restore critical efforts to protect and empower women and promote global economic development.”

Additionally, the President apparently intends to fund the U.N. Population Fund.  Jack Smith at the Catholic Key blog explains:

Appended to the president's action was a notice in which he said:

In addition, I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S financial support for the U.N. Population Fund. By resuming funding to UNFPA, the U.S. will be joining 180 other donor nations working collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve the health of women and children, prevent HIV/AIDS and provide family planning assistance to women in 154 countries.

This action could be even more monstrous than the reversal of the Mexico City Policy. The U.S. government ceased funding the UNFPA after independent investigations found the agency complicit in China's coercive one-child policy - coercion that includes forced abortions.

Following the State Department's own 2002 investigation, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote a letter to Congress saying, "UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion."

Cardinal George had previously urged President Obama to keep the policy intact out of respect for life and for other cultures:

The Mexico City Policy, first established in 1984, has wrongly been attacked as a restriction on foreign aid for family planning. In fact, it has not reduced such aid at all, but has ensured that family planning funds are not diverted to organizations dedicated to performing and promoting abortions instead of reducing them. Once the clear line between family planning and abortion is erased, the idea of using family planning to reduce abortions becomes meaningless, and abortion tends to replace contraception as the means for reducing family size. A shift toward promoting abortion in developing nations would also increase distrust of the United States in these nations, whose values and culture often reject abortion, at a time when we need their trust and respect.

A New Commitment to Stopping Genocide

President-elect Barack Obama recently announced his choice of Susan E. Rice for Ambassador to the United Nations. She supports U.N. intervention in the worse cases of civil rights violations, such as in the ongoing genocidal war in Sudan.

Rice's personal experience of the Rwanda genocide led her to believe that the international community has the duty to act to protect endangered populations.

[T]he posting will offer Rice a platform from which to decry long-standing global concerns. For instance, she has voiced a commitment to use American muscle to protect human rights in Africa, particularly in Darfur, where she has raised the prospect of a naval blockade and a bombing campaign to compel the Sudanese government to halt mass violence.

Rice has spoken movingly about how she was shaken by the genocide in Rwanda, where as many as 800,000 were killed. Describing a 1994 visit to the country, Rice told Stanford University's alumni magazine that she saw "hundreds if not thousands of decomposing corpses outside and inside a church. Corpses that had been hacked up. It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. It makes you mad. It makes you determined."

Since then, Rice has said she has been haunted by the United States' failure to intervene or to reinforce a beleaguered U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda on the eve of the genocide.

"Rice has learned a lesson from what happened in Rwanda, and, together with the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, she cannot turn a blind eye on anything happening in Africa," said James Kimonyo, Rwanda's ambassador to the United States. "We are very optimistic she is going to be effective" in her new post, he said.

Pope Benedict XVI in his address to the United Nations this year affirmed this principle of the international body's responsibility to protect.

Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect. This has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity. Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made. If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments. The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty. On the contrary, it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage. What is needed is a deeper search for ways of pre-empting and managing conflicts by exploring every possible diplomatic avenue, and giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue or desire for reconciliation.

Mary Ann Glendon at Meeting 2008, Rimini

Mary Ann Glendon, US Ambassador to the Holy See, addressed us on the Pope’s talk to the United Nations earlier this year. She said she witnessed the standing ovation for the Pope at the UN, but the message was complex and needs to be unpacked.

The Pope’s approach was to offer friendly encouragement to the UN. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris. Cardinal Roncalli, later John XXIII, praised this work, as did John Paul II later; the latter called it the highest expression of human conscience of our times. The potential for peaceful change was seen in Eastern Europe and South Africa.

In 1998 John Paul II saw two shadows over this Declaration, at Beijing and Cairo. Human rights is the common language of international relations. But the more human rights gains power, the more intense the effort to capture this power toward other ends.

In 1948, people scoffed at the idea that words could change the world. In 1989, words of truth changed the world. [The Berlin wall came down.] Good and evil was called by name. Vaclav Havel was a man of words, an artist, but he also worried about the power of words to be used as lethal arrows. A noble enterprise can take the wrong turn. The Human Rights project is so powerful it could be turned against the person.

Pope Benedict XVI praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for putting the person at the heart of the institution. But he pointed out fully nine warnings at the heart of the institution, nine dilemmas more acute as human rights advances.

1. Cultural relativism
2. Positivism
3. Problem of Foundations
4. Utilitarianism
5. Selective approach to rights
6. Escalating new rights
7. Hyper-individualism
8. Relationship of rights and responsibilities
9. Threat to religious freedom by dogmatic secularism

1. Cultural specificity can be used to hide behind vs. legitimate cultural pluralism. The inculturation of the Catholic church in various cultures has shown an accumulated experience which is not in opposition to rights and cultural underpinnings. On the other hand, the rise of cultural imperialism characterizes the professional international institutions which can be insensitive to local particularities.

2. The critique of positivism. Justice is denied when legality is divorced from its ethical foundation. The American founds of the Declaration of Independence acknowledged that rights are not erected by government, but are pre-political. Hamilton stated that the sacred rights of man are not found in old parchments but are written in human nature by the divinity.

Human rights come from laws discovered by reason and experience. To remove them from their context risks them. These laws are extremely important, as found in the Declaration of Human Rights. They are hard-won cultural achievements which are fragile in the postmodern world.

3. Foundations: Philosophical relativism is in the popular culture. Values are just preferences. There are no common truths. How can we uphold universal rights. Czeslaw Milosz said the fate of the old repertoire of the rights of man is beside an abyss, without religion how will they last?

Benedict XVI emphasizes reason and experience. But who decides? Liberal democracies depend on separation of powers, checks and balances, an 18th century European invention designed to govern large groups of people in freedom.

4. Another problem of foundations is utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest good for the greatest number. But this puts at risk the weakest members of society and can become just the will of the stronger.

5. Fundamental human rights can be treated with selectivity, with a menu of favorites while others are flaunted. For 60 years, the Holy See has been the biggest supporters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, providing for marriage, family, parental rights, religious freedom.

6. There is the pressure to expand the category of universal rights. The category can’t be closed as new situations arise, but there are more goods and desires which some demand to become universal rights. This trivializes core needs. They are agenda items. The Pope called for great discernment for legitimate vs. illegitimate new rights. The way to discern is to see what is healthy vs. harmful, and to see that these rights don’t privilege some groups.

7. The individualist approach denies the social dimension. Rights and duties come from human interaction, from solidarity in society. What are the assumptions about persons and their relationship to society? De Tocqueville predicted a new form of the despotism of the individual withdrawn into themselves and their banal pleasures.

8. Does a right recognize responsibility? A correlation between rights and duties is necessary.

9. The threat to religious freedom by dogmatic secularism, which insists on keeping religion from public life. This ignores the Biblical roots of modernity.

The positive answer from the Pope comes elsewhere in his writings, particularly in the address for La Sapienza to the legal faculty on juridical norms for dignity and human rights. The argument from the majority means that sensitivity to truth can be overruled by self-interest.

What is truth? That was the dilemma of Pontius Pilate. The Pope did not answer for them, but offered an invitation to search for the truth, to join the journey with the great ones with a restlessness for truth which beckons beyond an individual answer.

An 18 year old on another occasion asked the Pope this question. There are only two options. To recognize the priority of Reason at the beginning of all things, or to recognize the priority of the irrational where everything in life is accidental. The great option of Christianity is recognizing rationality and giving priority to reason.

The applications to the Human Rights Project show that self-serving tendencies to freedom are not the whole story. We have the same freedom to be protagonists, not nobodies. This should inspire us to decisive action so that we can help shift probabilities in favor of human dignity. In Spe Salvi, the Pope said that every new generation as the task to find the right way to order human affairs. The stakes are high, but can we embrace the task and accept the challenges.