US wants UN to declare that abortion is not a right [View All]

[ckramer]

The Bush administration insisted on Monday that a U.N. document on women's equality make clear that abortion is not a fundamental right and accused activists of trying to distort the issue.

Even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his opening speech to a high-level review session of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, came in for criticism for using the term "sexual rights" which the U.S. delegates said was undefined.

"There is no fundamental right to abortion," said Ellen Sauerbrey, the U.S. delegate to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, which is running the review.

"And yet it keeps coming up largely driven by NGOs (nongovernmental groups) trying to hijack the term and trying to make it into a definition," she told a news conference. She would not name any of the activist groups.


reuters