The most prolific human rights organizations in the United States and abroad value equal and unrestricted access to all maternal care, including abortion, as a human right.
At home, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought for the right to abortion since the 1950s, and Physicians for Human Rights has reaffirmed this stance as recently as May of 2022. Abroad, the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the World Health Organization have all argued the same: Access to abortion is a human right. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, the U.N.’s official body designed to advocate for and protect such liberties, wrote in a 2018 statement that “States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion” when the pregnant person is at risk of harm, physical or otherwise, and that those parties should not take steps toward criminalizing abortion, which would inherently promote unsafe abortion.
The stances on abortion are clear, then: In the eyes of the international community, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is a violation of the current international consensus on abortion.
The language of the U.N. statement, however, is important: “states parties.” The United States, by its own choice, is party to the treaties this statement refers to, and it was even a member of the UNHRC until June of 2018. Still, the nation flagrantly refuses to oblige with it. Those two words draw attention to a hypocrisy at the heart of the United States’ position in world politics and especially in international human rights law: The United States has, for decades, spoken in favor of the advancement of human rights, women’s rights, and non-discrimination abroad, while reserving the right to enact violatory legislation at home. It is nothing less than a calculated lie, and one that deserves more attention in domestic political discussion.
A Worrying Beginning
The United States’ influence on international human rights law, and its engagement in this hypocrisy, dates back to the earliest prototypes of the United Nations. President Wilson’s League of Nations was an unabashed failure, but it was a failure that cemented a political stance taken by the United States government in international law over and over again.
From the beginning, the idea held significant, if not unilateral, bipartisan support from the American political system; this was not just a liberal experiment. Furthermore, it was an American, President Wilson, who spearheaded the push for a League of Nations. There were also two Americans, Wilson and his advisor Edward House, in the group of politicians who wrote the League’s founding document, with the two of them taking leading roles in the writing of the document and being named in the dignitary list first. An American-led, heavily American-influenced team created the foundations for the League to exist, both in word and in writing.
However, in a move that despaired Wilson to no end, the United States Senate, invigorated by a conservative attack on the League on both ideological and partisan grounds, voted against ratifying the Treaty of Versailles and joining the League of Nations. The League eventually failed at its primary mission of preventing another global conflict like World War I, so one could argue that America’s decision not to join was inconsequential in the long term — or, conversely, that the League without the United States would have never worked at all. Nevertheless, this pattern would continue to repeat itself in international law: The United States supports, and perhaps even spearheads, initiatives intended to protect human life and liberty internationally, but when it comes time to adopt those principles for ourselves, we refuse.
A Pattern of Non-Compliance
This same pattern emerged again and again throughout the 20th century. An American politician, Eleanor Roosevelt, initiated the move toward a United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a notably non-binding declaration — as opposed to a treaty, which would have demanded legal compliance (at least in theory). The United States delegation voted in favor of it.
The subsequent 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a legally binding treaty based on the Declaration of Human Rights, was not so easily accepted; the United States, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, refused to ratify the treaty until 1992, during the first Bush administration. Moreover, the United States applied more reservations, understandings, and declarations on the treaty upon its ratification of the treaty than any other nation before or since, primarily in order to reserve the right to execute minors.
Yet despite eventually agreeing to the covenant, reservations and all, the United States has refused to change its domestic laws to fit the rights guaranteed by the treaty. The United Nations Human Rights Committee pointed out this attitude of non-compliance in a 2006 statement, imploring the “State party” to take corrective measures. As of now, no such measures have been taken, and, instead, numerous pieces of legislation in direct violation of the spirit, if not the wording, of the treaty have been proposed and passed through the legislature.
In fact, according to the majority opinions of the District court cases Buell v. Mitchell and Hain v. Gibson, American citizens are not automatically allowed to use the International Covenant as the basis for lawsuits to protect their human rights. The United States helped create a system to protect the rights of the human individual from being infringed, but its politicians, even while actively praising that system, have refused any opportunity to apply the legal framework of that system domestically, rendering it largely ineffective.
The Present Reality
It is within this tradition of blatant disregard for the international human rights law that Americans have helped influence what is now the current conservative legal push around abortion. The U.N. Human Rights Committee has made it abundantly clear that the right to abortion needs to be protected as a human right, but the United States’ political system — specifically its conservative factions — has made it no problem to espouse the virtue of international human rights law. They even argue that America has a duty to protect it when other countries ignore it. However, they are perfectly content with ignoring it themselves at home, especially with regard to abortion. It is the most blatant of hypocrisies for American politicians, especially conservatives, to present the United States as the land of liberty while knowing full well that what they are pushing for directly violates international human rights law.
There are only two solutions: Either the American government, on both the left and right, takes active steps to better comply with the treaties it signed and the systems it helped influence, or it becomes more forthcoming with the fact that many of the laws pushed for and enacted by its conservative factions are directly going against those treaties and those systems. Until then, the United States will continue to appear as unwilling to treat its own citizens with the respect that it has previously argued is due to all citizens of the world. In a concerning twist, the phrase “America is the policeman of the world” may take on a new meaning: not that the nation is uniquely prepared and willing to enforce the moral law, but that it believes that, because of its power, it can act above it.
Image by Colin Lloyd is licensed under the Unsplash License.
