According to reports, if President Biden signs the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pandemic Treaty and International Health Regulations (IHR), the United States could be bound by international law to both accept and implement all portions of the treaty, including unlimited abortion through all 40 weeks of pregnancy.
Member States of the WHO have agreed to a global process to negotiate a treaty aimed at strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. The final draft is expected to be submitted at the World Health Assembly in May 2024. Based on the previous statements by the WHO, it views abortion as a vital component of health care and during the Covid-19 pandemic, it called abortion ‘essential health care’. It is, therefore, likely that the WHO would consider abortion to be ‘essential health care’ during any future pandemic as well.
As reported by Liberty Counsel, “When the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked last year, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus immediately took to social media to criticize our High Court. Not only did Tedros declare that abortion should be ‘understood as health care,’ he also irrationally claimed that ‘safe and legal abortion saves lives.'”
Likewise, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist up until 2022, said that protecting preborn children from abortion is akin to “denying someone a life-saving drug.”
The WHO has not been shy about its strong support for abortion, calling it a “critical public health and human rights issue” — not because it strips an entire group of humans of their humanity and right to life but because the WHO believes that killing innocent children in the womb is itself a human right. It has even asked member states to remove conscience protections for healthcare workers who do not want to partake in abortions.
According to C-Fam, the Biden administration supports the WHO in including abortion as an essential health service under the pandemic treaty. During negotiations of the treaty draft, Biden appointee Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto called for “access to essential health care services during pandemics, including sexual and reproductive health services” to be part of the draft of the treaty. “Sexual and reproductive health” is a euphemism commonly used to refer to abortion, the intentional and direct killing of human beings before birth.
In addition, China, with the support of Hamamoto, called for secrecy surrounding the continued negotiations of the treaty and said that such information should not be made available to the citizens of the world whom it would direclty affect.
If the WHO pandemic treaty does include abortion on demand as anticipated, the U.S. and other member states could be obiligated to allow abortion on demand during a pandemic response, including the allocation of the provision of specific “essential” health services.
While the treaty draft affirms the sovereignty of the member states to determine their own approach to public health and pandemic prevention and prepardness, reports C-Fam, it includes the caveat that the member states’ “jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.”
“Damage” is not currently defined and is therefore open to interpretation. Any actions by the member states that are deemed to be discriminatory or damage-causing — such as laws protecting preborn children — could therefore be viewed as restrictions on “essential health services.”
