Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-02-Speech-2-320"
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"en.20020702.14.2-320"2
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"Mr President, all of the issues raised in the report fall not within Community competence, but within the competence of national political bodies. We should not, therefore, even be discussing it or voting on it tomorrow. This abusive external interference in self-determination and in the free will of the citizens reaches the height of absurdity in paragraph 28, by proposing to force our taxpayers to finance actions in third countries in the service of a militant agenda to promote abortion. This, as a matter of fact, is the report’s greatest weakness: an apparent lack of focus and considerable confusion. It takes issues which, when taken individually, are positive, such as the rejection of abortion as a method of family planning, the need to reduce the recourse to abortion and the viewing of sex education in a global and positive way, based on mutual respect and on responsibility. The report, however, confuses these issues with others that either correspond exactly to the opposite doctrine or which lead, as has been proved, to the opposite result. Consequently, the overall implementation of this set of guidelines that has prevailed in many countries, as formulated in the report, can only lead to disastrous results, some of them recognised, as a matter of fact, in the report both in the number of teenage pregnancies and in the alarming spread of sexually transmitted diseases despite all the information that is so widely distributed.
According to the media, my country would be one of the direct targets of this report. Portugal held a referendum four years ago on liberalising abortion and won ‘the right to life’. I am, therefore, sorry to see some federalists here choosing to see the Community as an appeals court and supporting the scam of putting pressure on the free expression of the citizens’ will, whilst the debate is obviously still ongoing. This debate, however, which is a serious one, is not on women’s rights, but on the rights of the child, of the child that has been created and is about to be born. This is what divides us, not the body of the person who chooses but the life of those who have no choice. The report takes the side of the stronger against the weaker. The weaker person is also often the woman who has been abandoned by her husband or partner, or pressured by her social set to have an abortion that, deep down, she does not want. And the weakest is always and in every case the child, who is at a vulnerable and helpless stage of development. It is the weakest that need the protection of society and of the law and who look to us to provide this. In my country we choose to act in this way; we take the side of the weakest. And it is our right to do so, provided that this is allowed by law and that this is what our citizens want."@en1
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