Canada pushes abortion at U.N. (News in Brief: United Nations).

New York -- A United Nations Commission on the Status of Women meeting was suspended in disarray last week as various country delegates objected to the attempt by the chairman to ratify a document to which they objected.

Feminists have pushed hard at the UN to say that CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) mandates abortion. However, they are being opposed by countries which refuse to give up their religious objection to abortion.

The feminists wanted to include the words "condemn violence against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition, or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination." Iran, Egypt, and Sudan objected to the phrase, but Canada and the EU (European Union) led the charge in refusing to allow the statement to be deleted from the document. In U.N. feminist parlance "violence against women" includes refusal to allow abortion; this is called 'forced pregnancy.'

The Canadian delegation was headed by MP Jean Augustine, who also heads Ottawa's Status of Women department. The feminists of her department provide the hard core pro-abortionists who determine Canada's cultural foreign policy.

Jean Augustine is originally from Trinidad. She is a former teacher and principal in the Catholic school system of Etobicoke-Toronto and is supposed to be a Catholic. She was parachuted into the riding by Jean Chretien after a pro-life candidate had been elected to run in the riding. As a convinced feminist, she is pro-abortion.

In November 2002, Augustine hosted a meeting of more than 130 parliamentarians from around the world invited by an organization she herself founded in October 1997, the Canadian Association of Parliamentarians on Population and Development (CAPPD).

CAPPD is an all-party group of 54 members of the House of Commons with a mandate to study population and development issues and to influence public policy. Since its launch, CAPPD has convened meetings with a dozen other federal departments and agencies such as CIDA, Oxfam, the Canadian Public Health Organization, and the Red Cross. Their prime preoccupation so far has been curbing population growth (Life Site/Interim).