“The Sandbaek Report signals a new regulation that will determine the EU’s aid policies abroad over the next five years. It obliges the EU to use its own funds to assist the promotion of the recognition of the rights of reproductive and sexual hygiene” through a series of health services that, according to the World Health Organization, “include abortion”. That’s the comment on the European Parliament’s Sandbaek Report expressed by John Smeaton, director of SPUC, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, the main lay anti-abortion organization in the UK, which has a membership of 30,000, including many Catholics and is affiliated with the International Federation for the Right to Life. “Since EU regulations take precedence over the laws of the member states – says Smeaton -, that means that all the countries of the EU will now be obliged to fund abortions in the developing countries and that the new law will even be applied to countries like Ireland, Malta and Poland which have a ‘pro-life’ constitution”. The “tragic vote” of the European Parliament – declares Smeaton – “has turned the EU into one of the main promoters of the culture of abortion and death in the world”. In an open letter of 28 January addressed to the bishops of Comece in Brussels, Smeaton said he was “deeply concerned by this development because, although the EU is not competent to legislate on abortion, an agenda in favour of abortion is being propagated without an appropriate democratic evaluation and without any specific debate”.
