How to Use the Articles

 

The San Jose articles were created to help governments and civil society promote human rights through a proper understanding of how the rights of the unborn child are protected in international law. The articles should be used to counter false assertions, such as the erroneous notion that abortion is a human right.

 

LEGISLATORS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS should use the San Jose Articles to help channel international aid to maternal and child health care programs which ensure a healthy outcome of pregnancy for both mother and child and to justify the withholding of funds which violate the right to life of the unborn child from conception.

 

LEGISLATORS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS should use the San Jose Articles as a benchmark to ensure that national laws and policies protect the human right to life from conception and to reject pressure to adopt laws that legalize or depenalize abortion. This should be achieved through binding and nonbinding resolutions.

 

GOVERNMENTS should use the San Jose Articles to hold accountable United Nations staff who make false assertions or exert pressure on their government to liberalize abortion laws, or when international aid agencies make aid conditional on a their country’s acceptance of abortion.

 

JUDGES should use the San Jose Articles to protect national laws and policies protecting the human right to life from conception and to interpret international legal obligations to protect that right. Judges should use the San Jose Articles to counter lawsuits invoking UN human rights treaties or comments by UN human rights experts which claim that abortion is a human right. Judges should use the San Jose Articles in asserting the human rights of the unborn child.

 

LAWYERS should use the San Jose Articles to help them invoke human rights provisions guaranteeing the right to life as encompassing a state responsibility to protect the unborn child from abortion.

 

LAW PROFESSORS AND STUDENTS should cite the San Jose Articles in law review articles, in legal panels, and in class.

 

ACTIVISTS should use the San Jose Articles to educate the general public, teachers, policy makers, and the media that there is no international legal obligation to provide access to abortion based on any ground, including but not limited to health, privacy or sexual autonomy, or non-discrimination.

 

STUDENTS should use the San Jose Articles as a springboard for learning more about how all human beings, as members of the human family, are entitled to recognition of their inherent dignity and to protection of their inalienable human rights, and to challenge false assertions which deny this inherent dignity.