Valuing women's lives

Amnesty International's decision to back abortion in cases of rape or where the woman's life is in danger is a brave and principled one.

After over two years of discussion and debate, Amnesty International finally announced last week that it will be campaigning for women to have access to abortion in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the pregnancy jeopardises a mother's life or health. This is a huge step forward for women's rights worldwide, especially in areas of conflict where rape is employed as a weapon of war or as a tool for ethnic cleansing.

Unsurprisingly, this decision has led to an outpouring of condemnation from religious bodies, most notably from the Roman Catholic church. Only yesterday, the Right Rev Michael Evans, the Catholic Bishop of East Anglia, said:

"The Catholic church shares Amnesty's strong commitment to oppose violence against women (for example, rape, sexual assault and incest), but such appalling violence must not be answered by violence against the most vulnerable and defenceless form of human life in a woman's womb."

What the bishop and his church fail to understand is that forcing a woman to continue with a pregnancy against her will is a continuation of the violence against her. It doesn't matter how much empathy and support is on offer, at the end of the day it is the woman, not the church, who is faced with the reality of an unwanted child, a child that is the product of one of the worst violations against her. Denying abortion to a woman in these circumstances is forced pregnancy, and as such it is a breach of a woman's human rights.

When they occur as part of an armed conflict, forced pregnancy and forced maternity are regarded as war crimes and are breaches of the Geneva convention, and yet still the Catholic church and the anti-abortion movement refuse to acknowledge a woman's right to her own bodily integrity, and her right to control over her own reproduction.

For how much longer is the Catholic church going to regard the "human life in a woman's womb" as being of more importance than the human life that possesses a womb?


Faced with this staggering death toll, and with the systematic rape of the women of Darfur, Amnesty International, the world's foremost human rights campaigning organisation, surely had no choice but to take last Friday's decision? To ignore these obscenities, as the Catholic church and the Evangelical crusaders would seem to prefer, would be to condemn yet more women to this fate. While the religious right might be comfortable with such a stance, no organisation that truly valued women's lives would be.

Amnesty has been quick to point out that this decision does not signal a move towards recognising abortion as a woman's right, that it is only advocating abortion in certain circumstances. But even this is not enough for the Catholic church, which last week called on Catholics to withdraw support for Amnesty's work if the decision went against the church's stance of no abortion being justifiable, no matter what the circumstances. Thankfully this bullying didn't work, but Amnesty must be aware that there is a risk of financial loss if large numbers of its supporters do pull out.

This was a brave and principled decision by Amnesty based on human rights values not on religious ones. Catholics who support human rights should respect this, and ignore the calls from their leaders who continue to regard women as no more than vessels for reproduction. Women have as much right to life as anyone; they certainly have more right to life than a foetus that has been forced upon them through an act of sexual violence.