The Center for Reproductive Rights wrote some memos for internal publication on how they planned to promote international abortion rights, paid for by the government whether the government has chosen to do so or not .  These memos were not intended for general publication and, according to the following articles by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute, CRR has notified them that CRR intends to sue them for publicizing the information contained in the memos.

Those memos, however, are now part of the US Congressional Record and are information freely available to the public.  If you would like to read them, the portion of the Congressional Record that contains the memos has been copied and is available at:

http://www.c-fam.org/pdfs/SecretLegalDocuments.pdf

If international events interest you, you can sign up to have the Friday Fax arrive by e-mail every week.  The United Nations may seem remote, but its actions will affect family life in the future.  Keep up with what’s happening in the area of international agreements.

Check out www.c-fam.org and browse the old Friday Faxes.  They are fascinating reading.  Below are the Friday Fax issues pertaining to this portion of the Congressional Record.

FRIDAY FAX
December 5, 2003
Volume 6, Number 50
FIRST OF A SERIES

Secret Memos Reveal Worldwide Pro-Abortion Legal Strategy

        The Friday Fax has acquired a number of internal memos produced by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) that map out CRR’s multi-year strategy for establishing binding and enforceable international reproductive rights laws, most notably girls’ and women’s right to state-financed abortion on demand. The memos were written to summarize the conclusions of strategic planning meetings held by CRR in late October, and they explain in detail how the Center, along with its many pro-abortion allies throughout the world, plans to expand international laws well beyond their current scope and to impose these new laws worldwide, even upon individual nations that do not explicitly assent to the changes.
        The memos appear to confirm long-standing fears of some legal scholars that international negotiations on human rights laws are no longer conducted in good faith, and that national sovereignty is jeopardized by such negotiations.

        In the memos, CRR repeatedly states that its “overarching goal is to ensure that governments worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of an understanding that they are bound to do so.” These rights would include the broadest possible access to abortion, and the establishment of abortion as an internationally recognized human right, but they are not limited to abortion. CRR also speaks of the international community’s need to recognize the “inalienable nature” of what it calls “sexual rights.” These rights will in turn require new laws that “explicitly address the legal and social subordination women face within their families, marriages, communities and societies.” They will also require the establishment of “reproductive autonomy” for girls, which CRR describes as access to all reproductive information and services, including abortion, without parental notification or consent.

        CRR hopes to achieve these goals through a multi-pronged strategy. First, CRR will work to radically expand the interpretations of already-accepted international rights, what CRR calls “hard norms,” into vehicles for its reproductive rights agenda. Thus, CRR claims to have found, or “grounded,” a right to abortion in the right to life, the right to health, even the right to enjoy scientific progress. CRR favors this approach because “there is a stealth quality to the work: we are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition.”

        Second, CRR hopes to create new customary international laws, what it calls “soft norms,” that explicitly mention abortion and sexual autonomy. According to CRR, if soft norms are repeated often enough, they may become hard norms, and therefore binding on nations. Soft norms accumulate in a host of international and regional settings, including through the European Court of Human Rights and UN compliance committees.

        Finally, CRR seeks a means to impose these new international laws on recalcitrant nations. Thus, CRR will be “supporting efforts to strengthen existing enforcement mechanisms, such as the campaign for the International Criminal Court and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.”

 The Friday Fax is reported and written by Douglas Sylva, C-FAM Vice President.

FRIDAY FAX
December 12, 2003
Volume 6, Number 51
SECOND OF A THREE PART SERIES

CRR Threatens Legal Action/Documents Read into Congressional Record

    In an effort to stop further dissemination of its top-secret strategy to produce an international right to abortion-on-demand, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) has threatened legal action against the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), which broke the story of this international law strategy in its December 5 Friday Fax.
    In a letter faxed to C-FAM’s New York office, Nancy Northup, president of CRR, claims that “disclosure of this material has caused, and further disclosure will cause, CRR irreparable harm.” Therefore, Northup makes a number of “demands” upon C-FAM, including that C-FAM must return all copies of the memos, must “cease and desist from any further dissemination, by whatever means, including written, email, fax, oral, or electronic, of the Center’s internal memos,” and even that C-FAM must “identify to the Center all persons and organizations, including email addresses, to whom C-FAM disseminated the Center’s proprietary information.”

    However, no legal maneuvering against C-FAM can now protect this strategy from further public scrutiny, since the internal CRR memos, which describe the strategy were this week introduced into the permanent US Congressional Record by Congressman Christopher Smith (R-NJ).

    In a statement explaining his submission of the documents into the Congressional Record, Smith said that “It is critical that both the American and foreign public are made aware of these documents because they shed new light on the schemes of those who want to promote abortion here and abroad….These documents are important for the public to see because they expose the wolf donning sheep’s clothing in an attempt to sanitize violence against children. These papers reveal a Trojan Horse of deceit. In their own words, these documents demonstrate how abortion promotion groups are planning to push abortion…not by direct argument, but by twisting words and definitions.”

    Smith appeared particularly troubled by some of the admissions made in the memos, such as the CRR statement that “…there is a stealth quality to the work: we are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions.” Smith also highlighted a statement from a CRR trustee, who asserted that “We have to fight harder, be a little dirtier.”

    Through this “stealth” campaign to produce new international laws, another trustee hopes that CRR will become the “midwife to the global choice movement.”

 [The Friday Fax is reported and written by Douglas A. Sylva, C-FAM Vice-President.]

FRIDAY FAX
December 19, 2003
Volume 6, Number 52
THIRD OF A SERIES

CRR Intimidation Campaign Spreads Beyond C-FAM

    As news of the Center for Reproductive Right’s (CRR) top secret memos to establish international abortion and “sexual” rights spreads within the public policy community, CRR has stepped up its campaign to silence critics by threatening more groups with lawsuits. Organizations including Focus on the Family and LifeNews.com have received letters similar to the one sent to the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ordering them to “cease and desist” further discussion of the subject, to return all copies of the memo, and to provide CRR with a detailed list of all groups and individuals informed by the organizations about CRR. A man posing as a reported also quizzed John-Henry Westin, editor of the Canadian-based Life Site News, demanding to know when Westin received the documents. The man refused to tell Westin who he was working for and also refused to leave a telephone number causing Westin to assume the man was a CRR investigator posing as a reporter.

    Citing first amendment protections and the fact that the memos are now part of the Congressional Record, neither groups has assented to CRR’s demands.

    At the same time, analysis of the documents continues to reveal startling details of both the means and long-term goals of the abortion-advocacy group. Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), who introduced the memos into the Congressional Record, notes that “One of their strategies is to manipulate international norms to force countries to do what CRR wants.” In the memos, CRR states that “there are several advantages to relying primarily on interpretations of hard norms. As interpretations of norms acknowledging reproductive rights are repeated in international bodies, the legitimacy of these rights is reinforced. In addition the gradual nature of this approach ensures that we are never in an ‘all-or-nothing’ situation where we may risk a major setback.”

    Smith highlights the fact that, in these memos, intended only for CRR and its pro-abortion allies, CRR candidly mentions that this strategy has not yet worked. According to Smith, “Thankfully, they admit that they have not been successful so far in twisting the international definition of human rights to include the killing of unborn children through abortion. They disclose that, in their opinion, ‘…there is no binding hard norm that recognizes women’s right to terminate a pregnancy.’ And ‘…the global community has fallen short of recognizing a right to independent decision-making in abortion, providing us with relatively few short norms.’”

    Smith also describes CRR’s domestic goals, “CRR has programs to work with major medical groups to oppose parental involvement in abortion decisions and to ‘debunk the extent of parental rights currently recognized.’ They have programs on forcing hospitals to do abortions and on forcing taxpayers to use state and federal funds to pay for abortion. They even go so far as to target Pregnancy Resource Centers.”

    John O’Neil, a pro-life advocate from California, also notes that CRR acknowledges that it intends to undermine laws mandating the reporting of child abuse for what CRR labels “non-abusive sexual relations,” which appears to mean that CRR intends to fight age of consent laws, the primary goal of groups such as the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

 [The Friday Fax is reported and written by C-FAM Vice President Douglas A. Sylva.]

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