UN report drops charge that Catholic teaching on abortion is ‘torture’

BEN JOHNSON lifesitenews.com Although a United Nations official said the Catholic Church's teaching against abortion constitutes a form of “torture” during a tense cross-examination earlier this month, the UN quietly dropped such allegations from its final report on the Vatican issued today. Instead the UN Committee Against Torture's document focuses on the main topic of the hearings, held on May 5 in Geneva: the clergy abuse scandal. But that's not what made the headlines on May 5, when one of the panel's two representatives used the hearings to allege that opposition to abortion-on-demand violated the UN Charter Against Torture. Felice Gaer, the director of the American Jewish Committee's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, said the Christian religion's traditional respect for all life may be responsible for nine-year-old rape victims giving birth. “This committee has found repeatedly that laws that criminalize the termination of pregnancy in all circumstances can violate the terms of the convention," Gaer said, focusing on opposition to abortion in the cases of rape and incest. Her remarks drew frustrated rebuttals from Catholic political observers, and the Vatican itself. to read more: lifesitenews.com