Vatican Will Not Sign UN Treaty on Disabled Rights

From Catholic World News:

Feb. 1, 2007 (CWNews.com) - The Holy See will not approve a UN treaty on the rights of the disabled, because of “unacceptable” language referring to legalize abortion and gender rights.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s permanent observer at the UN, has announced that the Vatican cannot accept the terms of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which won approval by the General Assembly in December.

While strong favoring the rights of the disabled, Archbishop Migliore explained, the Vatican cannot assent to the treaty’s treatment of “reproductive rights.” That phrase has frequently been interpreted by UN officials as a call for legal abortion. Vatican delegations have expressed reservations about the use of the term in previous UN documents, notably including the statements issued by the Cairo and Beijing conferences in 1994 and 1995, respectively.

Because some countries now consider abortion an intrinsic aspect of “reproductive rights,” the archbishop continued, the Holy See fought against inclusion of that phrase in the treaty on the disabled. As it stands, he said, the phrase is “denying the inherent right to life of every human being,” despite assurances elsewhere in the treaty.

“It is surely tragic,” Archbishop Migliore said, that “the same Convention created to protect persons with disabilities from all discrimination in the exercise of their rights, may be used to deny the very basic right to life of disabled unborn persons.

My Comments:
I will be interested to see whether the Bush Administration follows the Vatican lead on this. Under a President Gore or a President Kerry or a President Hillary! or a President Obama, I don't think there would be any question that the U.S. would sign onto this treaty.

And will John Kerry refer to the Vatican as a "pariah" for not joining the rest of the world in supporting the "rights" of the disabled to be aborted?