Value Life

            We can strengthen our families, communities, and nations by valuing life itself. It should not matter whether a person is born or unborn, old or young, sick or healthy, white or colored. All lives have value and should be cherished.

            The U.S. State Department recently took a stand for life when they did not include “reproductive rights” in their annual report on global human rights. This means that the State Department does not consider abortion to be a human right.

            According to LifeSiteNews, Ambassador Michael Kozak stated “that forced abortions and involuntary sterilization would be considered violations of human rights.” He also said, “We’ve really gotten at it by flipping back to the original U.S. statutory language. It’s in places like China where in order to enforce their – now – two-child policy that there are reports of coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization [or] in North Korea, where the government also coerces [or] forces abortion – although sometimes that’s for political punishment rather than family planning.”

            Kozak said that the report “includes only rights recognized in human rights law and only those that are `most egregious.’ Among those he included torture, extrajudicial killings, forced

Disappearances, criminalization of libel, and then he added `criminalization of LGBT consensual sexual activity…’” The author questions why LGBT is mentioned at all and emphasizes: “There is no human rights treaty that mentions homosexuality, let alone genital activity between homosexuals.” So it appears that the State Department corrected one error by ruling that there are no “reproductive rights” in human rights law but made another one by saying that there are LGBT rights there.

            Obviously, we cannot win all the fights, but we did win a big one to have the State Department say in their report that there are no “reproductive rights.” This statement may have influence on ending abortion on demand. Families, communities, and nations are stronger when all human life is valued.