Samantha Singson reports for C-FAM ----On Friday the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) will conclude its latest round of two-week meetings in New York, having questioned six out of the eight countries under review on their abortion laws. As in previous sessions, CEDAW Committee members used the question of maternal mortality and contraceptive prevalence to bring up the issue of abortion in Mauritania, Mozambique, Pakistan, Serbia, Sierra Leone and Syria. Notably, two delegations took the opportunity to push back.
Abortion is not mentioned in the treaty, but delegations often go along with the committees’ line of questioning on abortion by providing data and answering queries on the subject during their reviews. During this round of talks, however, delegations deviated from the routine by making statements in stark contrast to the committee’s argument. The delegate from Pakistan, undergoing its first review, told CEDAW that “abortion is considered murder once a fetus is conceived,” and then stated that abortion was illegal in her country except to save the life of the mother.
When committee members criticized Sierra Leone for low contraceptive prevalence, the delegate responded that in Sierra Leone there was a prevailing cultural belief that “children were a gift from God.”...
