The following is a response requested by Austin Ruse, president of C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute working exclusively on social policy at international institutions.
Stopping Global Abortion Means Working with All Men
Diana West objects to Christians lobbying and otherwise making common cause on pro-life and pro-family issues with Muslim countries at the UN. She believes we give aid and comfort to those who persecute Christians; that we contribute to the spread of militant Islam, and help to spread Sharia.
Here’s an inescapable fact. Without the help of Muslim countries, abortion would have become a human right enforceable against all countries long ago. A global coalition of Evangelicals, Mormons, Muslims and Catholics cannot bear a world where the slaughter of the innocents is the law of the world.
This fight would not be necessary if Christian nations stood for life and family at the UN. But they don’t. In fact it is formerly Christian Europe that leads the charge to impose death-dealing “human rights” on the countries of the world. Other regions, including largely Catholic Latin America, go along for various reasons, including financial coercion.
As Donald Rumsfeld said, you fight with the army you have–and as it is, this includes a small handful of Muslim countries who are not afraid to stand up to Europe, the UN and the US on their hard left sexual agenda, but who in some cases also practice profoundly objectionable policies at home.
West seems to suggest that we step aside and in the process let radical secularists have their way if the cost of stopping them includes working with Muslims. But letting the radical secularists have their way on the UN on the issue of abortion means an ever-increasing body count. The unknown global cost in human lives due to abortion eclipses any other human rights tragedy our world has ever known.
What we have done as a movement is put aside our own profound theological differences to defend that universal first right, the right to life, which makes every other right and freedom possible, including freedom of religion. Ambassador Tom Farr, formerly of the State Department’s office of religious freedom, once said the best example of inter-faith and inter-religious dialogue in the entire world occurs in the pro-life coalition at the UN.
Do we spread Sharia by working privately with Muslim diplomats; behind closed and usually locked UN doors? Do we spread radical Islam and aid in religious persecution as West implies? No. These are merely overheated assertions.
While we have so far been successful in blocking an international right to abortion and thereby have saved countless lives, we have done even more. By working with Muslim diplomats, offering to them a strong Christian witness, by befriending them and even loving them, we have in some profound yet unknowable way offered hope to our persecuted brethren.
This is after all the Christian way that is rarely understood by the world.