Miss. lawmakers join bicameral letter opposing U.N. “anti-life recommendations.”
U.S. Senators Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), and U.S. Representatives Steven Palazzo (R-MS) and Michael Guest (R-MS), joined more than 50 lawmakers in a letter to World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressing strong opposition to the agency’s updated Abortion Care Guideline.
The updated guidelines follow years of controversy regarding the role, allegiance, and effectiveness of the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations.
The lawmakers argue that that these “extreme” new guidelines aim to remove all legal and policy safeguards on abortion, impose restrictions on the conscience rights of health workers, and ignore the right to life and the safety of the mother and child.
“We are astonished that the WHO is attempting to de-humanize preborn children and assert that the rights of the preborn do not exist by categorizing self-induced — and, in some cases, illegal — abortions as ‘self-care’ and demanding ‘the full decriminalization of abortion’ without any gestational age limits,” the lawmakers wrote. “To categorize abortions as ‘self-care’ not only strips away the humanity and dignity of a preborn child but also contradicts international standards recognizing the preborn child as a rights-holding person.”
“The W.H.O.’s radical stance reveals that it is all too willing to cave to pressure from the abortion industry and to force health care providers to choose between committing violence against an innocent baby and her mother, or being unemployed,” the lawmakers continued. “This stance also inevitably threatens patient access to health care in geographic areas that are primarily served by faith-based health care providers given that those who hold conscience objections would be deemed unfit for service.”
The lawmakers added that given the W.H.O.’s influence, this guidance will likely cause severe, irreversible harm, not only to U.S. citizens but to women and children worldwide.
“Such overreach and trampling of national sovereignty also further delegitimizes the W.H.O. and U.N. in the eyes of many people around the world. For these reasons, we ask that the W.H.O. reverse course and retract the anti-life recommendations that it has promoted through the release of its 2022 abortion care guidelines,” the lawmakers said.
You can read the full letter below.
Letter to WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus by yallpolitics on Scribd
Anne Summerhays
