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President Barack Obama's much-anticipated pro-United Nations treaty campaign has been launched with a White House ceremony declaring support for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But despite the title and language of the treaty, including the affirmation of a "right to life," it is doubtful whether the treaty would protect the rights of unborn children with disabilities, such as those with Down syndrome.

Through its affirmation of "sexual and reproductive health"―a phrase that clearly means access to abortion and abortion rights―the treaty also supports abortion, even though it has been estimated that over 90 percent of pregnancies in the United States with a diagnosis of Down syndrome are terminated through abortion.

This controversial aspect of the seemingly non-controversial treaty has been completely ignored in the many stories hailing Obama's endorsement of the "legally binding" measure. However, it explains why a pro-abortion administration would support such a measure. This treaty, for the first time in history, establishes an international right to abortion.

On the left, the George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch called it "the first international human rights treaty signed by the United States in nearly a decade" and identified "several other important outstanding treaties" that should be signed and/or ratified, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

But the disability rights treaty also has implications for the debate over Obama's plan to create a government-sponsored health care plan that could ration health care to the elderly.

Veteran journalist Patricia E. Bauer, who writes a blog on disability issues, says that more than 50 million people in the U.S. have disabilities, "a number that is growing rapidly as the population ages," and that "Experts say disability will soon affect the lives of most Americans."

Rather than have U.S. officials continue to decide how to deal with these matters, this treaty sets up an international committee to decide whether the U.S. complies with its provisions and whether the U.S. needs to pass more laws to protect the rights of the disabled. It takes decisions away from the U.S. federal and state governments, even though the U.S. passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 19 years ago.

This U.N.-sponsored "Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)" describes itself as "the body of independent experts which monitors implementation of the Convention by the States Parties."

One of the members of this committee is Jia Yang, Vice President of the China Association of the Blind. Her government, to say the least, has a perverted notion of "human rights" and has even interpreted the women's rights or CEDAW treaty as allowing forced abortions.

At a White House ceremony last Friday, Obama said that the ADA "showed the world our full commitment to the rights of people with disabilities―and now we have an opportunity to live up to that commitment...Disability rights aren't just civil rights to be enforced here at home; they're universal rights to be recognized and promoted around the world." He called it "the first new human rights convention of the 21st century."

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