From my letter to Amnesty International

As a long-time supporter of Amnesty International (most recently in an unsuccessful attempt to get a student chapter started here at this law school), I write to urge caution in adopting the proposed positions favoring reproductive rights. The essential problem is that the world is increasingly divided over whether such positions would be steps toward or away from universal human rights. That is, state enforcement of abortion rights would not just be something that conservatives might object to—like support of gay rights, for example—but rather would undercut your credibility with many of your natural constituencies. Many would see you as coming out against certain fundamental human rights, namely the universal right to life as well as the right of conscience-based refusal to participate in violence, something that could not easily be said regarding gay rights or almost any other cause AI might wish to support. [An international right to life before birth is recognized in the U.N. Dclaration of the Rights of the Child and in the American Convention on Human Rights.]

Even on the Left, such an endorsement is problematic. What I mean is this: Some  on the Left not only consider abortion rights an anti-communitarian expression of extreme individualism, a claiming of private ownership of the next generation, but also see rights-talk (in  the context of the real world) as hostile to care and concern for the needs of women. Catherine MacKinnon, for example, has written of the way “privacy” language thrusts women back to private oppression (where males will decide to abort their wanted children) and away from public equality. As with the so-called right-to-work, the individual freedom to abort is in reality a freedom for the powerful more easily to oppress the weak—especially in the third world.

Only after women have achieved true equality could it be argued that abortion would be truly their own right rather than that of their male oppressors.