My latest letter published - On Abortion and Amnesty International

[Ederico]

The Times & The Sunday Times, Malta

Amnesty promoting human rights abuse

Edric Micallef Figallo, Nadur.

A news item on BBC - homepage - Home of the BBC on the Internet recently caught my attention. It referred to Amnesty International, one of the many organisations that often holds a holier-than-thou attitude. It involved the call by the Vatican for all Catholics to desist from aiding Amnesty International, due its misplaced position on certain cases of abortion which the latter seeks to represent incorrectly as a product of a human right.

As many others do, Amnesty International speaks on human rights in an arbitrary fashion touting "liberty" and the rights of the apparently disadvantaged. Mind you, I'm not saying that certain people are not in a terrible situation but even such people have their responsibilities in relation to the rights of others, in this case the living unborn. Amnesty International, as expected, stress women's rights. There is no human right, on the part of women or anyone else, to end the life of someone else when that someone else is not posing a real and direct threat to the genuine rights of the aborting mother.

The right to life is possibly the closest to absolute there could be, and only certain exceptional and dire cases warrant its negation (such as legitimate self-defence, combat in war, et cetera). When someone is denied such right because of the determination of others without his positive action to cause such a determination, then we can speak of the greatest human rights abuse ever. This is what Amnesty International is promoting on an international level, with sad and fallacious excuses such as rape and incest to warrant abortion. The whole point of the right to life in this case, is the right to life of the unborn, not the right to give life of the mother.

The rights of fathers are also obviously neglected and cast aside, but I won't treat this here.

Sophism about life and personhood in law is just empty words and a waste of time while children are being aborted by the minute worldwide. Organic life is a process of growth, maturation and decay. At the moment that the process is functionally given start to, life is present. Birth is only part of this process and not the sine qua non of it all. Mothers and fathers are extremely distraught when miscarriages happen, for they have lost a true living child. Civil law itself gives rights to unborn infants in the field of succession while criminal law considers it a very serious aggravation if through bodily harm on a pregnant woman an abortion is caused. My conclusion: Let holier-than-thou organisations like Amnesty International stand for what they really believe in, therefore human rights properly understood in this case.

As for the rest, please cut the ideological-legalistic sophistry while millions of children are murdered as time passes by due to some unnatural and legally inexistent right.