Human Rights Watch is an abortion advocacy organization. Its website is completely filled with its lobbying efforts and advocacy for access to abortion and contraception. What follows is a mere sample of HRW’s advocacy for abortion.
In the wake of President Donald Trump’s reinstating of the Mexico City Policy (which bans federal funds from going to aid organizations that perform or advocate for abortion overseas), HRW called for the US to pass the Global HER act, which would permanently repeal it. Referring to the Mexico City Policy as the “global gag rule,” Human Rights Watch called on “foreign governments, multilateral institutions and foundations to narrow the funding gap for comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services and support groups that provide such services, including safe and legal abortion.” HRW even produced a video attacking the Mexico City Policy:
In 2017, HRW urged lawmakers in Brazil to reject a ban on abortion. Regarding the proposed ban, José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch went on record to say that:
“A total abortion ban would have devastating consequences for women and girls in Brazil. Under this cruel amendment, even women and girls pregnant as a result of rape and those with life-threatening complications would be forced to either continue their pregnancies against their will or risk imprisonment and other health dangers, including death, by having clandestine abortions.”
In relation to HRW’s call for Brazil to reject the abortion ban, HRW’s researcher with the Children’s Rights Division Margaret Wurth wrote an article titled, “No Woman Should Need to Beg for An Abortion.” In the article she argues:
“Last week, Rebeca Mendes Silva Leite, a 30-year-old woman from São Paulo, Brazil, asked Brazil’s Supreme Court for permission to safely and legally terminate an unplanned pregnancy she does not want to continue. No woman should find herself in this position.”
In the conclusion, she wrote: “Brazilian authorities should take urgent steps to decriminalize abortion and protect women’s rights to make deeply personal decisions about their health and lives.”
HRW even has an entire page dedicated to what it calls “Reproductive Rights and Abortion.”
In one of the articles HRW posted on its “Reproductive Rights and Abortion” page, HRW actually called the blocking of access to contraception a “war crime” and a “crime against humanity.” Included with the article, HRW posted a video it produced echoing the same sentiment:
In January of 2010, Human Rights Watch issued a public statement supporting a woman’s right to an abortion in Ireland. The article, titled, “A State of Isolation: Access to Abortion for Women in Ireland,” concluded that:
The Irish government should take all necessary steps, both immediate and incremental, to ensure that women have informed and un-coerced access to safe and legal abortion services within Ireland as an element of women’s exercise of their reproductive and other human rights. In the interim, the government should immediately ensure that those abortion services that are currently legal under Irish law be provided to all who need them without discrimination, and that full and accurate information on how to obtain safe abortions both within Ireland and outside its borders be available to all women, without discrimination.
On a page regarding abortion on the HRW website, it provided an overview of abortion laws in five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. In this overview, HRW states, “equitable access to safe abortion services is first and foremost a human right. Where abortion is safe and legal, no one is forced to have one. Where abortion is illegal and unsafe, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or suffer serious health consequences and even death.”
Conclusion
Human Rights Watch is fully advocating and lobbying for complete access to abortion throughout the entire world. It is also fighting to ensure that contraception is readily available to anyone who wants it, even to the point of claiming that denial of access to contraception is a “crime against humanity.”
Because of HRW’s unwavering promoting of these grave moral evils, no Christian could ever, in good conscience, support, provide funds or a clean image for this organization.
