Feb 27, 2005 / 22:00 pm
The United States is demanding that the United Nations adopt an amendment to a 10-year-old landmark platform on women’s rights, stating that women are not guaranteed the right to abortion, reported The Associated Press.
About 6,000 advocates from international women’s groups and representatives from more than 100 countries are meeting in New York for the next two weeks to assess how governments have implemented the U.N.’s 1995 action plan, designed to achieve the equality of the sexes. The meeting began Sunday.
The 150-page platform was designed at a U.N. women's conference in Beijing. At the end of that conference, delegates had asked governments to review laws that punish women for having abortions.
But at an informal closed-door meeting Feb. 24, before the current conference got under way, the United States voiced its concerns that the Beijing platform legalized the right to abortion as a human right.
The U.S. proposed an amendment Feb. 25 that would reaffirm the Beijing declaration, but only "while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights, and that they do not include the right to abortion."
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