Last year the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted a deeply troubling position on abortions. In a long and thoughtful article on an issue that is as emotionally fraught as it is intellectually and morally challenging, Dr. David Bell explains how the organization’s abortion care guidance published in March 2022 calls for babies to “be killed up until the moment they emerge from the birth canal, without delay, whenever a pregnant woman requests it.” Thus Recommendation 2(LP) says that abortion should be available on request and 3(LP) advises against “laws and other regulations that prohibit abortion based on gestational age limits” (p. xxv).

Whatever possessed the WHO to set itself up as the arbiter of the moral compass of all the peoples and countries of the world? Under no conceivable circumstance is this a decision to be arrived at by an international bureaucracy. Only the governments concerned have the right and the responsibility to make decisions on policy parameters between the competing demands and value preferences of pro-choice and pro-life advocates. This is not just a bureaucratic but also a moral overreach.