Amnesty International should stop pressurising Ireland and Northern Ireland to legalise abortion

The national charities LIFE and Right To Life are marking the 48^th anniversary of the Abortion Act by calling attention to the 8 million lives lost since 1967, and urging lawmakers in Ireland and Northern Ireland not to compromise their laws and society by bowing to the pressure of the abortion industry and its lobbyists.

They sound a warning of the consequences of such a compromise, following the launch of an expensive campaign by Amnesty International that uses celebrities to attempt to convince Ireland and Northern Ireland to abolish their legal and constitutional protections for unborn children.

Millions of unborn lives have been lost and thousands of women have been psychologically harmed in Great Britain because of the 1967 Act. It paved the way for the emergence of a multi-million pound industry costing the taxpayer over £100 million a year. Since its inception, abortion providers have consistently misinterpreted, abused and broken the law with impunity. The safeguards built into the law have been rendered ineffective, with the CPS refusing to prosecute doctors in some cases.

Those who voted for the Abortion Act could never have envisaged a day when abortions would be performed at the rate of one every three minutes, when nine out of ten babies with Down’s Syndrome would be aborted, when babies would be terminated because they were the ‘wrong’ gender, and when the bodies of aborted babies would be burnt to heat hospitals. This is certainly not a situation that we should want Ireland or indeed any other country to move towards.

Amnesty International, which was born out of the conviction that the human rights of the oppressed and vulnerable should be vocally supported by those who believed in the dignity of all human beings, now perversely campaigns for a human right to end human lives. Specifically the most vulnerable of all: unborn children. Where nations have chosen to resist abortion, Amnesty is spending significant sums of charity funds to pressure them to ensure the platform exists for the termination of babies in the womb. It is ironic that an organisation which in 1977 received the Nobel Peace Prize for its lifesaving work would today be championing ending the very lives that most need the humane advocacy it is meant to provide.

All people of good will, who wish to call Amnesty back to the humane founding principles of their organisation under the late Peter Benenson, can visit the new website of our Amnesty Travesty campaign and sign the open letter calling on them to stop pressuring countries into accepting the inhumanity of abortion.

As friends from across the Irish sea, LIFE and Right To Life are calling on the people and lawmakers of Ireland and Northern Ireland to avoid the tragedy that Great Britain’s abortion laws have engendered, and stand firm against the pressure by Amnesty and similar organisations to compromise their legal safeguards for the most vulnerable of their fellow citizens. In doing so they will protect women, prevent the horrific loss of life experienced in the United Kingdom since 1967, and affirm the dignity and right to life of all members of the human family.