New York City, N.Y., Feb 26, 2010 / 23:17 pm
Pro-life supporters from around the world will “give a witness to life” on Monday in New York when they protest at the annual U.N. Conference on the Status of Women. The yearly gathering will be attended by delegates who made a strong push for international abortion rights 15 years ago at the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women.
“On Monday morning, 6,000 radical feminists will descend on New York City,” Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) told CNA. “They are also celebrating what they call Beijing +15, which is the 15th anniversary of the huge women’s conference in Beijing during the Clinton years." Ruse noted that Hillary Clinton led the U.S. delegation to the Beijing conference, and that “they tried mightily to get an explicit international right to abortion.”
However, a coalition of pro-lifers from around the world who worked closely with the Vatican and Muslim countries defeated the abortion provision.
“But they’ve never given up,” Ruse said. Throughout the last 15 years, the pro-abortion lobby has tried again and again to make legalized abortion an international priority. It is expected that Monday's conference will see another attempt to do the same.
However, on Monday, “they will be met by a determined group, a small group but a determined group, of pro-lifers from the United States, Europe, Africa, Latin America,” said Ruse. “And we will be there to give witness to life and family as it is properly understood.”
Ruse also told CNA that the group “Catholics for Free Choice” will be at the conference and that they will be circulating a petition calling on Christians “to complain to the government of Nicaragua,” a government which has just eliminated all legal forms of abortion in their country.
“But we will be there to meet them too,” Ruse added.