The Organization of American States is the regional version of the European Union. As such, it has the risk of increasing overreach in sovereign nations. When it comes to the right to life from conception, its judicial branch has leaders that want to undermine that right. In fact, there is currently a court process to pressure Central American nations into eliminating that right altogether.
In the past, the OAS was already able to pressure Costa Rica into legalising IVF, despite the ethical concerns in that Central American Countries. The next step is to use a fake case in order to legalise abortion in El Salvador, where there are no exceptions admitted. “Caso Beatriz” is now being used to end that.
“Beatriz” was pregnant with a child whose brain was not fully formed. She was born and died shortly after. Her mother suffered no harm and died years later in a motorcycle accident. However, pro-abortion activists intend to use her death in order to legalise abortion, as if it were the lack of access that killed her and not the collision.
This case is the next in line after the failure of “Caso Manuela”, where a woman killed her newborn baby and died in jail as a result of cancer. Yet feminist movements used her death to claim that it was a result of lack of access to an abortion, again in El Salvador.
As a result, the Inter-American Court currently has El Salvador on trial. This case shows that, contrary to feminist rhetoric, abortion is not a “women’s issue”. In fact, a team of female attorneys has been leading El Salvador’s defence.
Lawyers such as these and other professionals are part of a resistance movement that is lobbying in order to protect national sovereignty as well as the right to life. Recently, a multi-national group headed to Washington, DC in order to make sure that civil society was also involved in the decision-making.
I contacted one of the attorneys present at the last OAS session, Attorney Maria del Pilar Vazquez Calva, Founder of the Collective of Free and Sovereign Women, and put some questions to her for Mercator. Her answers follow.
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What is the risk to the sovereignty of nations?
The member nations of the inter-American system have granted jurisdiction to the Inter-American Court and the Inter-American Commission. When accepting to be under the jurisdiction of the Court, nations do so knowing the catalogue of human rights to which they adhere and which they must guarantee to their citizens.
Nations can protect their sovereignty from ideological impositions to which they did not commit and which are neither part of the International Treaties nor part of the Inter-American System.