Trump State Dept. Just Issued Abortion Announcement We've Been Waiting For
President Donald Trump’s administration has been standing up for the unborn since day one, and it just made another huge move to protect human life — one which will be felt all over the world.
On Friday, a top diplomat said the administration believes abortion “is not a human right” and will not treat it as such.
According to the Washington Examiner, Ambassador Michael Kozak made the announcement to reporters while talking about why a State Department report on human rights doesn’t monitor “restrictions” on the ability of a mother to terminate unborn life.
“We don’t report on it, because it’s not a human right,” Kozak said.
The decision to excise the phrase “reproductive rights” from the annual State Department report has been met with much controversy from the liberal quarters of the media. The phrase has been replaced with “coerced family planning,” indicating an emphasis on forced abortions.
Kozak, who has held his position at the State Department since 2014, says that abortion is “an issue of great policy debate, you can have a good discussion, but there’s no internationally-recognized standard as to what’s the right treatment.”
“But, the other, yes — it is internationally recognized that somebody shouldn’t coerce you to have an abortion or force you to be sterilized,” he said.
Kozak said the change was to bring the the human rights report into concert with U.S. law.
“We’ve really gotten at it by flipping back to the original U.S. statutory language,” Kozak said.
“It’s in places like China where in order to enforce their — now — two-child policy that there are reports of coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization (or) in North Korea, where the government also coerces (or) forces abortion — although sometimes that’s for political punishment rather than family planning.”
While the term “reproductive rights” was added under the Obama administration, Kozak said it was never intended to refer to abortion access.
“We have never taken the position that abortion was a human right under international law,” Kozak said.
“This is supposed to be (a report on) internationally recognized human rights. And, it’s an issue on which some countries prohibit abortion, some countries like our own, have pretty much no restriction on it, and we don’t say one of those is right, one of those is wrong,” he added.
How true it is that the Obama administration didn’t take the position that abortion was a universal human right is a matter of debate.
However, Amnesty International certainly seems to think it did. In a statement regarding the language change, the group said the Trump administration was attacking women’s rights by protecting the unborn.
“Reproductive rights are human rights, and omitting the issue signals the Trump administration’s latest retreat from global leadership on human rights,” said Joanne Lin, the national director of advocacy and governmental relations at Amnesty International U.S.A.
“Human rights defenders should view the reports with a critical eye, and fight against any effort to obscure or diminish violations of human rights wherever they may occur.”
Of course, the most important human right is the right to life, something that’s denied to millions of unborn children every year. Language matters, and by changing how abortion is reported when it comes to human rights, the Trump administration has taken a major step toward protecting them the world over.
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