Abstract
Rita Joseph is an author and social activisit who lives in Australia. She specializes in human rights issues. She is intimately familiar with the myriad international laws and conventions in this arena and has developed a great deal of expertise in how they impact the plight of unborn children. She has worked for a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and has participated in various U.N. conferences and commission sessions, including the Beijing Conference on Women (1995) and the Beijing +5 Conference in New York (2000). She has advised members of the Australian government as both a special advisor at U.N. conferences and as a witness in various parliamentary venues on human rights. Joseph lectured at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies (Melbourne, Australia) from 2001–2006, teaching courses on the international politics of human rights and on the language of human rights. She has an excellent command of Catholic social teaching as it pertains to the family and its place in society. She presents the fruits of her study and expertise in her book Human Rights and the Unborn Child. She is convinced that the rights of the unborn child are protected by key U.N. documents. This book provides the evidence needed to show that contrary claims by abortion supporters are false.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide historical background demonstrating that the authors of the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly recognized that the unborn child, like all other innocent human beings, has an inalienable right to life. Chapter 3 focuses on the “fundamentals” of the declaration. It shows that the declaration is grounded in the incomparable dignity of the human person, which in turn is rooted in basic natural-law principles. Because these chapters underpin arguments given in later chapters, a detailed presentation of their contents is necessary.
Chapter 1
This chapter analyzes the 1959 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of the Child. The third paragraph of the preamble explicitly affirms the unborn child's inalienable right to life; it states that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth” (emphasis added). The context of this statement is provided in the preamble's second paragraph, which says that
the United Nations has, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proclaimed that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth therein, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.
The third paragraph, therefore, particularizes the scope of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child to the special case of the child “before and after birth,” eliminating possible ambiguity over applying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights's provisions to the unborn child. The preamble's fourth paragraph proves that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized that the child's human rights, both before and after birth, are entitled to appropriate legal protection. It declares that
the need for such special safeguards [i.e., those mentioned in paragraph 3; emphasis added] has been stated in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924, and recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the statutes of specialized agencies and international organizations concerned with the welfare of children.
According to Joseph, the “insertion of the word ‘such’ here and repetition of the words ‘special safeguards’ makes the essential continuity of these two clauses [paragraphs 3 and 4] unmistakably clear” (9).
Chapter 2
This chapter summarizes the historical context of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how the civilized world in 1948 unambiguously recognized the right of the unborn human baby to be born and to enjoy appropriate legal and moral protection. Joseph discusses over fifteen documents to illustrate this point. Some documents were written before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. They reflect the common law tradition protecting the child before birth, most notably the ancient Hippocratic Oath and the 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Other sources immediately preceded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the British Medical Association's June 1947 reaffirmation of the Hippocratic Oath; textbooks on human embryology from the late 1940s affirming that the human embryo is a new human being and that fertilization marks the beginning of a new human life; and popular books, such as Dr. Benjamin Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
Joseph cites and analyzes various documents and other materials from 1947 through 1969 to substantiate her thesis: transcripts from the 1947 Nuremberg trials and tribunals, along with testimony from medical authorities given at them; the 1947 first draft of the International Covenant on Human Rights; the 1947 Fourth Geneva Convention; the 1948 World Medical Association's Geneva Declaration; the 1948 [inter-]American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, also known as the Bogotá Declaration; the 1959 U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child; and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Chapter 3
This chapter considers “Fundamentals of the Universal Declaration's Human Rights Protection.” Joseph reaffirms that the declaration recognizes the rights of the child before birth. She emphasizes that it specifies rights recognized in the charter of the U.N. and derives its binding power from the legal standing of that charter. Experts on international law agree that U.N. members are legally obliged to act in accord with the charter. Joseph stresses that: 1) the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child is of immense importance for explicitly affirming the unborn child's right to life and to appropriate legal protection; 2) human rights are essentially inalienable and timeless; 3) such rights are clarified by the Holocaust experience; and 4) they allow no one to be excluded.
The dignity of the human person, Joseph shows, is at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This dignity is itself a major principle of the natural law as noted by major figures influential in the articulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as Charles Malik of Lebanon, Field Marshal Smuts, and Eleanor Roosevelt among others. Referring to Natural Law and Natural Rights by John Finnis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), Joseph emphasizes how Finnis showed that the right to life of innocent persons, including the unborn, is rooted in the fundamental natural-law principle that the basic aspects of human good are never to be directly (i.e., intentionally) suppressed. This principle provides the rational basis for absolute human rights that prevail always and on every occasion, even against the most specific human, i.e., man-made, enactments and commands (for example, the racial and genocidal directives of Hitler). Procured abortion violates a basic human right.
Chapters 4–14
These chapters further develop the evidence and arguments given in chapters 1–3. They show the speciousness of later ideologically driven efforts to “re-interpret” the founding documents of the U.N. in order to dehumanize unborn children, rob them of their right to be born, decriminalize abortion, and make abortion a basic right of women.
Chapter 4 emphasizes that the inaugural human right, to be born free and equal, is an endowment accompanying a child's coming into being. It is not dependent on his or her being born, nor is it conferred by others. She surveys and criticizes contemporary ideological attempts by militant feminists and others to re-interpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and similar documents. Chapter 5 demonstrates that appropriate legal protection of this right means punishing abortion by law. Joseph surveys and criticizes efforts to deny the unborn child a legally recognized personality, to decriminalize abortion, and to rob him in other ways of the legal protections due him. Chapter 6 argues that the right to life embraces the right of all human beings to physical existence and to integrity from the moment of conception. It also supports the right of the mother of the unborn to the necessities of life. Furthermore, it protects persons against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment; and it repudiates abortion as part of the science of death.
Chapter 7 considers the unreasonableness of decriminalizing abortion and delivers a devastating critique of efforts to reinterpret the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Joseph reviews these efforts in detail to show the mental gymnastics and linguistic distortions used to “re-interpret” the basic documents and make them conform to a relativistic ethic.
Chapter 8 focuses on the publication of Legislative History on the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2007 (Geneva: United Nations, 2007). This document “provides support of the convention's recognition of the human rights of unborn child and States parties' obligation to protect them” (121). Joseph demolishes the claim by Adam Lopatka in his introduction to the Legislative History that the obligations the convention imposes on States do not extend to the child before birth because these rights are mentioned “only in the preamble” to the document. She demonstrates convincingly that he contradicts the “general rule of interpretation” given in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
Chapter 9 reviews and rebuts efforts to justify the abortion of disabled unborn children. Joseph shows how such efforts are incompatible with the verdicts and judgments of the Nuremberg Trials, testimony given at the Nuremberg Trials, and a myriad of conventions and declarations on the rights of the child. Many relevant sources are cited.
Chapter 10 declares: “The historical background to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950) reveals that a broad consensus for including the child before birth in human rights protection was operating universally and without controversy at that time” (179). However, the European Court of Human Rights in 2007 denied that the convention mandated protecting the unborn child's right to life, deeming him merely a “potential” and not actual person. Joseph reviews the vigorous dissent elicited by this decision and summarizes the consensus in the 1940s and 1950s that the unborn are persons whose right to life must be protected. She shows the speciousness of claims arguing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a “living document,” is subject to reinterpretation (184–200).
Chapter 11 demolishes the grossly erroneous misrepresentation of prior Latin American declarations and conventions given by the majority commissioners in the 1981 Baby Boy Resolution. Joseph discusses the nefarious influence of this resolution on later American declarations and conventions on human rights. These documents robbed the unborn of protections guaranteed in Latin American declarations of human rights principles from 1947 to 1969. The resolution's “majority commissioners” grossly misrepresented the meaning of “in general from the moment of conception,” a phrase that had appeared in the [inter-]American Convention on Human Rights of 1969. However, as the vehement dissents by the minority commissioners and relevant historical documents of that time show, the 1969 document in no way sought to deny unborn children legal protection of their right to life. The expression “in general” was used to avoid different kinds of issues and to be as concise as possible. Dr. Luis Demetrio Tinoco Castro, a participant in these discussion, made it clear that at key meetings on abortion and human rights in Latin American countries, “the concept, not discussed or put in doubt by anyone, that every person has the right to life, including those yet unborn, as well as incurables, imbeciles, and the insane was implicitly maintained.” Castro's point is corroborated by important studies by scholars like Mary Ann Glendon and Mala Htun regarding abortion legislation in Latin American countries, and also by relevant documents tracing the history of discussion of human rights in those lands. The relevant text of the 1981 resolution reads: “the legal implications of the clause ‘in general, from the moment of conception’ are substantially [emphasis added] different from the shorter phrase ‘from the moment of conception.’” But the “majority commissioners” interpreted this phrase as being not “substantially different” but “totally different” (emphasis added). The majority commissioners' mistake was used in subsequent legal disputes to deny the right to life of every child from the moment of conception.
Chapter 12 rebuts the 2003 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. First, it directly contradicts a basic principle of modern human-rights laws as well as several African regional human-rights declarations and charters, e.g., the Declaration on the Rights and Welfare of the African Child (1979), the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1981), and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990). Secondly, abortion language is incompatible with African values, contradicts and does not “supplement” African charters, and compounds an abused woman's tragedy.
Chapter 13, “Selective Abortion [Is] an Act of Violence and Discrimination on Grounds of Sex,” details the repudiation by abortion advocates of the condemnation of selective abortion of unborn girls by the 1995 Fourth U.N. Conference on Woman in Beijing. It then relates the subsequent reversal of this condemnation in 2007 at a U.N. meeting that in effect repudiated protections of unborn girls demanded by the 2005 U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child. This result is what happens so long as ideology triumphs over truth. Prenatal sex selection threatens to expose the weakness of abortion arguments.
Chapter 14 reaffirms that the absolute moral norm protecting the inviolability of the lives of innocent human beings by prohibiting their intentional killing fully applies to unborn children conceived as a result of rape and/or incest. Legalizing the abortion of these children facilitates the spread of the radical feminist view that an “unwanted” pregnancy is a “forced pregnancy” and that therefore the unwanted product of conception can be eliminated. The proper response to rape and incest is not abortion but proper pre- and postnatal care for the mother.
In her conclusion, Joseph develops the truth that “Ideologies Must Conform to Human Rights—Not Human Rights to Ideologies.”
This is truly a most important work. I recommend it without reservation.