Queen’s cousin: there is no such thing as a ‘right’ to abortion

by Hilary White, Rome Correspondent

• ROME, October 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – There is no such thing as a “right” to abortion, Lord Nicholas Windsor has said in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph. Lord Windsor, the youngest son of the Duke of Kent and the first cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II, is becoming noted not only as among the rare members of Britain’s Royal Family to convert to Catholicism, but more recently for his outspoken opposition to legalized abortion, which he compares with eugenics.

The cost of abortion, Lord Windsor said, “is too high because the cost is paid in innocent life.”

In a statement, Lord Windsor and Lord Alton of Liverpool denounced the “subversive” campaign by UN organizations that “bully” countries into accepting abortion as an international human right. The two will tell a meeting of the House of Lords that this campaign must be stopped to “uphold the right to life of unborn children” that is guaranteed by numerous international agreements.

“Frankly, officials and politicians in developing countries are being bullied into writing such a right to abortion into their domestic law,” Lord Windsor wrote.

In his op-ed piece, Lord Windsor frankly denounces legal abortion, enshrined as a right in Britain’s 1967 Abortion Act. Abortion, he said, is now defended as a solution to unplanned pregnancies, particularly among young girls.

“But it’s not a just solution for all concerned. It leaves out of the picture the consequences for ‘the entity,’ about whose nature we’ve disagreed so passionately in the last decades.”

The “interminable philosophical debates” on the moral status of the unborn, he wrote, are “sheer sophistry.” “Who’s kidding whom here?” The reality of abortion “became visceral for me once I started thinking hard about the subject.”

“It hit me in the stomach that terminating a pregnancy equaled none other than the destruction of a human being. It knocked the wind out of me the first time, as it does every single time I think of it.”

Born in 1970, three years after abortion was legalized, Lord Windsor said that his reaction comes from the realization that he himself could have been legally killed if he had been regarded as “inconvenient” to his mother, the Duchess of Kent.

“Bad luck, she didn’t. But my generation has had a close shave,” and “[o]thers of my generation weren’t that fortunate…

“That’s why we take this thing seriously, if you want to know. We were the first generation that really were vulnerable in the womb. Surely, the womb should be the safest place in the world to be. Not any more.”

Lord Windsor lives in Rome with his wife and small children, and is the chairman of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a foundation that hopes to combat acceptance of abortion in the European sphere.

His Telegraph piece and the meeting in the Lords is in collaboration with a group of experts in public policy and law at the UN who last week introduced a document denouncing the international campaign to press abortion as a “right.” The group hopes that the so-called San Jose Articles will give countries and organizations “on the ground” the means to combat such pressure.

At a meeting held in New York last week, the group of 30 signatories warned that institutions associated with the UN are known to misrepresent international law to promote the abortion as a recognized human right. According to the pro-family NGO, CFAM, as recently as a few weeks ago the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Secretary General, have all said such a right exists.

One of the signatories, Grover Joseph Rees III, the former US ambassador to East Timor, told media, “When I was in Timor I witnessed first-hand a sustained effort by some international civil servants and representatives of foreign NGOs to bully a small developing country into repealing its pro-life laws.

“The problem is that people on the ground, even government officials, have little with which to refute the extravagant claim that abortion is an internationally recognized human right. The San Jose Articles are intended to help them fight back.”

According to Human Rights Watch the CEDAW Committee has directed at least 93 countries to change their laws on abortion based on the presumption of abortion as a “right”.