May 4, 2006 / 22:00 pm

A number of pro-life organizations, including the Catholic 'Aid to the Church in Need' (ACN), have raised their voices against the international human rights advocacy group, Amnesty International, and its declared intention to spread abortion rights around the world.

On Friday, Father Joaquin Alliende, ACN’s international ecclesiastical assistant, said that it was “With great regret we have learned that Amnesty International has proposed advancing abortion ‘rights’ around the world as a new mission for their organization.”

The main paper of AI's new Sexual & Reproductive Rights Consultation Kit states that, "Governments have responsibilities to ensure that everyone's sexual and reproductive rights are protected."

"No one should be discriminated against”, it added, “when and if they attempt to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights, or ask that they be protected."

AI is now calling for the global decriminalisation of abortion and say that there should be widespread abortion on demand in cases involving sexual assault or risk to a woman's life.

Fr. Alliende, a Chilean priest, went on to explain: “AI has earned a high reputation for its intensive efforts to gain the release of innocent prisoners on conscience. ACN, a charity that is also often a ‘voice of thevoiceless,’ highly appreciates this moral commitment of AI.”
 
However, he said that “Now by proposing a pro-abortion initiative AI is abandoning its own noble ethical principles, thereby shaking the very foundations on which it is built; for the simple reason that unborn life in a mother’swomb is the very weakest of all threatened and persecuted human beings.”

“Thus”, he said,“the day this initiative was launched will become a day of mourning for all those who are unconditionally committed to true humanism,” he concluded.

Amnesty International’s current policy on abortion states that the group “takes no position on whether or not women have a right to choose to terminate unwanted pregnancies; there is no generally accepted right to abortion in international human rights law.”