Internal memos produced by a leading abortion-rights group map out a multi-year strategy for using the United Nations and other international bodies to impose so-called reproductive-rights laws worldwide.
The Center for Reproductive Rights wrote the memos as a summary of its strategic planning meetings last October, according to the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, or C-FAM, which obtained copies.
The memos show CRR "and many pro-abortion allies throughout the world plan to expand international laws well beyond their current scope and to impose these new laws worldwide, even upon individual nations that do not explicitly assent to the changes," according to C-FAM.
"The memos appear to confirm long-standing fears of some legal scholars that international negotiations on human-rights laws are no longer conducted in good faith, and that national sovereignty is jeopardized by such negotiations," C-FAM said.
In the memos, CRR repeatedly states its "overarching goal is to ensure that governments worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of an understanding that they are bound to do so."
Foremost among those rights is abortion-on-demand and establishment of abortion as a human right.
The group wants to go beyond abortion, however, and recognize the "inalienable nature" of what it calls "sexual rights."
Based on these "rights," CRR hopes new laws will be required that "explicitly address the legal and social subordination women face within their families, marriages, communities and societies."
Also, CRR believes this would lead to "reproductive autonomy" for girls, including access to all abortion services without permission of parents.
The multi-pronged strategy begins with expanding interpretation of rights already accepted internationally – called "hard norms" – such as the right to life, the right to health and even the right to enjoy scientific progress.
CRR says with this approach "there is a stealth quality to the work: We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition."
The second part of the strategy is to create new customary international laws, called "soft norms," that specifically address abortion and sexual autonomy. CRR says if these are repeated often enough, they can become "hard norms" that are binding on nations through bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights and U.N. compliance committees.
The final element is to seek a means to impose the new international laws on nations that opposed them.
CRR, therefore, will be "supporting efforts to strengthen existing enforcement mechanisms, such as the campaign for the International Criminal Court and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women."