Dear Colleague:

Colombia's Constitutional Court slapped down a lawsuit seeking to overturn
that nation's abortion law, and pro-life activists across Latin America
celebrate.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
9 December 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 48


A Feast for Life
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

In the Catholic country of Colombia, on the Catholic Feast of the
Immaculate Conception, the Constitutional Court rejected an attempt to
legalize abortion in a case that was meant to be a model for Latin
America.  Well-funded American and European pro-abortion groups backed
Colombian activist Mónica Roa in the now-familiar tyrannical strategy
favored by advocates of death in so many countries: If you cannot change
the law through the proper channels and democratic activism, use the
courts to impose your will.

PRI Latin American Director Carlos Polo helped coordinate opposition to
the lawsuit, now dismissed by a 5 to 3 (with one abstention) vote of the
court.  "The outcome is incredible," he says.  "Everything was against
us."  Pro-lifers thought that the pro-abortion side had a majority on
Colombia's highest constitutional court (don't they always?), and perhaps
they do, but the court refused to hear Roa's complaint due to inadequate
legal arguments.  Roa's complaint was officially brought by Women's Link
Worldwide, for which she works.  A second complaint, not brought by Roa,
was also rejected.

"The decision is very important for us in the pro-life movement in Latin
America," Polo says.   "Everyone in the pro-life movement in Latin America
will feel empowered.  Abortion is still a crime in Colombia, under every
circumstance.  No exceptions."

Roa used arguments increasingly familiar in American courts.  She claimed
that Colombia's international treaty commitments required the
liberalization of domestic abortion laws, which highlights once again the
importance of keeping "reproductive health rights" out of international
treaty language.  She made it clear that she wanted abortion on demand
legalized but sought specifically to create exceptions to save the life of
the mother (which are never needed with today's technology), to kill a
severely disabled unborn child not expected to live long after birth,
rape, and incest.

"It's clear that they made their best effort," Polo says.  Roa, an
attractive young legal activist of color with fashionably leftist views,
had the backing of major and minor Western pro-abortion groups from the
International Planned Parenthood Federation to the Ford Foundation to
Catholics for a Free Choice.  She came to the United States to spread the
word about the Colombian case and had previously spent two years at the
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York.  She is, or at least
was, a rising star in the set of left-wing internationally-oriented
litigators and activists employing every means possible to circumvent
republican self-government and implement their fascist model for society
whether it is abortion, family destruction, speech codes, radical
environmentalism, socialism, or the like.  American and European groups
have been raising a farm team of Latin American lawyers and activists to
alter the relatively pro-life cultures of these poor nations, and have
unfortunately made a lot of progress.  But not on the feast day.

The president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, must be relieved.  Asked if Uribe
is pro-life, Polo replied, "I don't think so.  He's a politician, you
know.  His wife declared in favor of Mónica Roa.  He was ambiguous."  Now,
Uribe won't have to respond to a court decision challenging the status
quo.

However, Manuel José Cepeda, president of the Constitutional Court, left
open the possibility of considering other challenges to Colombia's
abortion law in the future.  Even challenges based on international
treaties could be considered, since the judges did not decide that such
challenges are invalid, but only that Roa's did not clear the hurdle for
consideration.  The judges' decision rested on a number of technical
points and also this very important one: They decided that her arguments
rested on non-binding statements by international committees, not on the
language of treaties themselves.

Pro-family group Red Futuro Colombia ("Future of Colombia Network") said
in a statement after the court's decision, "The public debate generated
around the issue is a gain for the defense of life.  We have continually
shown how it was managed through a manipulation of sentiments, with false
arguments that repeatedly diverted attention from the fundamental point of
discussion: the inviolable right to life.  This very intent to distract
was the cause of the complaint's failure.  The constitutional court showed
its independence by not bowing to pressures nor ideological sympathies on
the part of certain opinion-makers who predicted a decision in favor of
the complaint."

If Women's Link had won this case, it would most likely have been imitated
in other Latin American countries.  The Mother of God gave Latin American
children an early Christmas gift this year.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.

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