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Miss. lawmakers seek withdrawal of WHO abortion guidelines
By WLBT.com Staff
WASHINGTON, D.C. (WLBT) - Mississippi lawmakers are among more than 50 lawmakers that are asking the World Health Organization to withdraw its recent guidelines on abortion.
U.S Senators Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), along with Representatives Steven Palazzo and Michael Guest (R-MS), along with other lawmakers expressed in a letter to WHO Director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, their opposition to the agency’s updated abortion care guidelines.
According to the WHO, the guideline “updates and replaces the recommendations in all previous WHO guidelines on abortion care,” and the document aims to “enable evidence-based decision-making with respect to quality abortion care.”
“We, members of the U.S. Congress, write to you today with concerns about the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O.) dangerous new abortion guidelines. These extreme new guidelines aim to remove all legal and policy safeguards on abortion, impose restrictions on the conscience rights of health workers, and ignore the right to life and the safety of the mother and child,” the lawmakers wrote.
“The W.H.O.’s radical stance reveals that it is all too willing to cave to pressure from the abortion industry and to force health care providers to choose between committing violence against an innocent baby and her mother, or being unemployed,” the lawmakers added. “This stance also inevitably threatens patient access to health care in geographic areas that are primarily served by faith-based health care providers given that those who hold conscience objections would be deemed unfit for service.”
The lawmakers conclude, “Given the W.H.O.’s influence, this guidance will likely cause severe, irreversible harm, not only to U.S. citizens but to women and children worldwide. Such overreach and trampling of national sovereignty also further delegitimizes the W.H.O. and U.N. in the eyes of many people around the world. For these reasons, we ask that the W.H.O. reverse course and retract the anti-life recommendations that it has promoted through the release of its 2022 abortion care guidelines.”