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CEDAW is dangerous treaty, warns Bobak

The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is a wonderful title that hides a very dangerous treaty, says Robyn Bobak.

CEDAW, which has been ratified by over 170 countries since its adoption by the United Nations in 1979, is currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate, Miss Bobak said in a talk at the Delaware Pro­Life Convention on March 29.

"We need to work together to defeat CEDAW, which is based on a false understanding of freedom and of the nature of the human person," she said.

Americans are especially susceptible to these false understandings because we have confused freedom-the right to be free to be fully what your nature intends you to be-with license-the right to do whatever you want to do, regardless of your nature, said Miss Bobak.

Since the UN was founded in 1945, it has adopted many human rights documents, she noted. CEDAW restates many of the freedoms in these existing documents, but adds three important conditions.

First, in forbidding discrimination against women, it stipulates that there should be no distinction based on sex.

This concept promotes an androgynous understanding of the person; but men and women are different in their nature in important ways, said Bobak.

Secondly, purportedly to give full equality to women, signature nations are required to change their educational systems, culture and traditions to eliminate stereo­typed roles of women.

The principal stereotyped roles of women are fertility and motherhood, said Bobak. The UN committee overseeing the enforcement of CEDAW has expressly stated that the nobility of motherhood is one of the stereotypes to be eliminated.

Thus, Belarus, a country that ratified CEDAW, was chastised by the committee for encouraging such traditions as Mother's Day.

All countries that sign on to CEDAW have to change their school textbooks to make them androgynous. For example, they must replace references to motherhood with terms such as "parenting" or "caregiving."

The second condition leads to the third: the construal of information and means to "family planning" as a fundamental right.

"You need number three­the right to contraception and abortion-so you are not enslaved to the role of motherhood," explained Bobak.

"It's a loaded agenda that has little to do with anti-discrimination and a lot to do with population control," a long-time goal of the UN and other population control advocates, she said. 

A study conducted by the World Bank, a UN agency, found that the greatest determinant of fertility was not, as expected, the availability of contraceptives, but how many children a woman wanted.

Population controllers at the UN have therefore shifted their emphasis toward educating girls to view motherhood as personally costly and a burden.

We need to be aware of these tendencies in our own education system, said Miss Bobak.

And while the CEDAW treaty is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she urged pro-lifers to "keep a close watch on it.

"A treaty trumps our own laws and would encroach on them," she warned.

Robyn Bobak is executive assistant to the president at The National Institute of Womanhood, a nonprofit think tank established to provide an authentic voice for womanhood at the UN and abroad.