ROME, October 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– There is no such thing as a “right” to abortion, Lord Nicholas
Windsor has said in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph. Lord Windsor,
the youngest son of the Duke of Kent and the first cousin once removed
to Queen Elizabeth II, is becoming noted not only as among the rare
members of Britain’s Royal Family to convert to Catholicism, but
more recently for his outspoken opposition to legalized abortion,
which he compares with eugenics.
The cost of abortion, Lord
Windsor said, “is too high because the cost is paid in innocent
life.”
In a statement, Lord
Windsor and Lord Alton of Liverpool denounced the “subversive”
campaign by UN organizations that “bully” countries into accepting
abortion as an international human right. The two will tell a meeting
of the House of Lords that this campaign must be stopped to “uphold
the right to life of unborn children” that is guaranteed by numerous
international agreements.
“Frankly, officials and
politicians in developing countries are being bullied into writing
such a right to abortion into their domestic
law,” Lord Windsor wrote.
In his op-ed piece, Lord
Windsor frankly denounces legal abortion, enshrined as a right in
Britain’s 1967 Abortion Act. Abortion, he said, is now defended as a
solution to unplanned pregnancies, particularly among young girls.
“But it’s not a just
solution for all concerned. It leaves out of the picture the
consequences for ‘the entity,’ about whose nature we’ve
disagreed so passionately in the last decades.”
The “interminable
philosophical debates” on the moral status of the unborn, he wrote,
are “sheer sophistry.” “Who’s kidding whom here?” The
reality of abortion “became visceral for me once I started thinking
hard about the subject.”
“It hit me in the
stomach that terminating a pregnancy equaled none other than the
destruction of a human being. It knocked the wind out of me the first
time, as it does every single time I think of it.”
Born in 1970, three years
after abortion was legalized, Lord Windsor said that his reaction
comes from the realization that he himself could have been legally
killed if he had been regarded as “inconvenient” to his mother,
the Duchess of Kent.
“Bad luck, she didn’t.
But my generation has had a close shave,” and “[o]thers of my
generation weren’t that fortunate…
“That’s why we take
this thing seriously, if you want to know. We were the first
generation that really were vulnerable in the womb. Surely, the womb
should be the safest place in the world to be. Not any more.”
Lord Windsor lives in Rome
with his wife and small children, and is the chairman of the
Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a foundation that hopes to combat
acceptance of abortion in the European sphere.
His Telegraph piece and
the meeting in the Lords is in collaboration with a group of experts
in public policy and law at the UN who last week introduced a document
denouncing the international campaign to press abortion as a
“right.” The group hopes that the so-called San Jose Articles will
give countries and organizations “on the ground” the means to
combat such pressure.
At a meeting held in New
York last week, the group of 30 signatories warned that institutions
associated with the UN are known to misrepresent international law to
promote the abortion as a recognized human right. According to the
pro-family NGO, CFAM, as recently as a few weeks ago the UN Special
Rapporteur on Health, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the
UN Secretary General, have all said such a right exists.
One of the signatories,
Grover Joseph Rees III, the former US ambassador to East Timor, told
media, “When I was in Timor I witnessed first-hand a sustained
effort by some international civil servants and representatives of
foreign NGOs to bully a small developing country into repealing its
pro-life laws.
“The problem is that
people on the ground, even government officials, have little with
which to refute the extravagant claim that abortion is an
internationally recognized human right. The San Jose Articles are
intended to help them fight back.”
According to Human Rights
Watch the CEDAW Committee has directed at least 93 countries to change
their laws on abortion based on the presumption of abortion as a
“right”.