Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-27-Speech-3-024"
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"en.20050427.7.3-024"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, a great many aspects of this report meet with our approval. Nonetheless, we believe there are parts of it that could be improved, and the matter of the arms embargo against China is undoubtedly one of the latter. If I may, however, I should like to focus on a number of amendments to the report which were rejected by the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and which have now been tabled again in plenary.
We have heard certain Members invoke reproductive health rights during almost every debate in the House in recent months on issues such as measures to combat AIDS, women’s rights in Europe and throughout the world and our humanitarian policy objectives. Bearing in mind the WHO’s definition of reproductive health rights, the implication is that we are being asked to vote on abortion. I am prepared to believe that all the Members of this House, and indeed all of us in Europe, are acting in good faith, yet I find it impossible to understand that abortion can be alluded to so frequently and with such flippancy, when it is something that a great many people all over the world believe to be morally inadmissible and cruel. This is the reasoning behind a great many of the amendments to this report. Even if not all of us are certain that human life is present at conception and during the first stages of pregnancy, there is surely no one who would argue rationally that we can be 100% certain that human life is not present during those first days, weeks and months of pregnancy. No one can be sure of such a thing. In this day and age, no one can rule out the possibility that abortion is an attack on innocent and defenceless human lives. The fact that we cannot be certain means that we should ask ourselves whether it is worth taking a risk when the stakes are so high. Do we want to be viewed by future generations in the same way that we now view those who were racist or who supported slavery? Do we want to be viewed as a society that realised it was unfair to discriminate against people on the basis of their race or origin, but that was entirely oblivious of the fact that it did itself discriminate against people on the basis of their stage of development? In order to prevent the risk of this happening, we should avoid making any reference to abortion or reproductive rights in our documents. I am quite sure that every single one of the objectives of our humanitarian policy could be achieved without any mention of abortion and reproductive rights, and this would allow us to act with a great deal more unanimity and solidarity. I thank you for your attention, and I would ask you not to view my comments as a statement of political confrontation. I am speaking in good faith as someone who believes in European unity, and who believes that Europe’s task is to pursue moral policies that do not attempt to impose on the rest of the world solutions to issues upon which we ourselves are divided in Europe."@en1
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