For over 45 years, Amnesty International members have stood alongside Catholics across the world working to secure the release of prisoners of conscience, abolish capital punishment, end the practice of torture, protect the rights of minorities and indigenous communities, and seek justice for the oppressed and exploited. However, as Christopher Rakovec correctly pointed out in his Thursday op-ed "Losing Amnesty" (Oct. 11), Amnesty has also recently adopted a policy on sexual and reproductive rights concerning certain aspects of abortion. Nonetheless, Rakovec fails to consider the context in which Amnesty International would enact such a policy shift.
Over the past years, through their work with Amnesty's "Stop Violence Against Women" campaign, Amnesty researchers began to see a disturbing trend: In conflict zones from Bosnia to Sudan to Guatemala, rape is being used as a weapon of war. The World Health Organization estimates that one in five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Women who are raped suffer additional abuse and isolation. In some countries abortion is a crime with severe penalties. According to Amnesty International research, recently in Nigeria, a woman who miscarried was accused of aborting and threatened with the death penalty. In many countries, women suffer terrible consequences when access to medical treatment is blocked. Every year, according to the UN Millennium Report, 70,000 women die from unsafe abortions and another five million suffer often debilitating complications.
As a human rights organization, Amnesty International could not remain silent in the face of this suffering. This new policy allows Amnesty to defend a woman's right to be free from any form of coercion, discrimination or violence as she makes and puts into effect informed decisions concerning reproduction, including decisions in relation to the continuation or termination of pregnancy. In particular, it calls for protection of women who seek an abortion as a consequence of rape or incest or medical treatment for complications arising from abortion, and it opposes sending women and their health care providers to jail for abortion.
Amnesty, however, takes no position on whether a woman should have an abortion under any of these circumstances. Instead, Amnesty seeks to assure that abortion services are safe and accessible to prevent grave human rights violations that can result if women are denied this option.
As Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty wrote in a recent letter to members: "We believe that one of our greatest strengths as a worldwide movement has been the solidarity forged among people of diverse beliefs who nonetheless share a commitment to ending suffering and who come together to work on human rights issues. We hope that those supporters who may disagree with our decision on this particular instance will continue to join our struggle to protect human rights around the world."
I urge Rakovec and other Catholic students at Boston College to take Cox's words to heart. We're in this struggle for human rights together and by focusing on our differences we only hurt the purpose of our work and the people who depend on it.
Leon Ratz is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences.
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