a roll of the dice

Those wacky funsters at the Vatican are at it again - this time they’re misrepresenting Amnesty’s new policy regarding abortion and instructing Catholics not to support the organisation. Amnesty’s position is that women who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest, or whose health is endangered by pregnancy, have the right to control their own reproductive systems. The actual policy states that:

[Amnesty] 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.

This has not stopped the church from portraying Amnesty as supporting “abortion rights”, and has led to numerous impassioned statements from senior Church figures about how this will provoke a ‘parting of ways’ between the Church and the organisation. The Vatican has instructed its millions of minions to provide no further funding or support to Amnesty (did you know the church also stands proudly against that other bastion of evil, UNICEF, for similar reasons?) as a result of this policy.

It is a curious sort of religious morality that can justify deliberately undermining one of the most important and effective human rights organisations in the world - a rare organisation that is essentially non-partisan, non-religious, and has excellent access to most governments around the world as a result - as a result of a disagreement about an issue which is widely recognised as highly contentious and challenging. As Amnesty’s chairman explains:

It was partly inspired by our experience in Africa where soldiers rape women in communities they attack to force them to have their children. We also believe women who have had abortions should benefit from medical care regardless of the reason for the abortion.

Rape is frequently used as a weapon in regional conflicts such as those taking place in Africa. Apparently it is so important to the Vatican that women in war zones be forced to carry their rapist’s children to term that they are prepared to ignore everything else that Amnesty stands for, including trying to stop said rapists from impregnating their victims in the first place, and instead withdraw support. But then, speaking of withdrawal, helping women avoid pregnancy in the first place has never has been the Vatican’s strong point.

As this blog points out, even from a devoutly Catholic perspective this is an example of ‘the perfect being the enemy of the good’.

Richard Nixon discusses morality with Pope
Paul VI (irrelevant, but a strange picture)