Members of the Catholic and Evangelical churches and conservative sectors participate in a demonstration against abortion in Guatemala City on Sept. 2, 2018, as the Congress is scheduled to vote on September 4, 2018, a bill to further criminalize abortion. Guatemala only allows abortions in cases where the mother's life is deemed to be in danger. | JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP via Getty Images

The President of Guatemala has declared that his country will officially become the pro-life capital of Latin America early next year.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei announced his intention to make Guatemala Latin America's pro-life capital during a speech at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., last week. Giammattei delivered remarks at an event hosted by the Institute for Women's Health, a pro-life organization founded by former Trump administration Department of Health and Human Services official Valerie Huber, and the International Human Rights Group.

As noted in a statement from the Institute for Women's Health, Giammattei was not invited to President Joe Biden's Democracy Summit, where leaders from the world's democracies gathered: "Guatemala was not invited to take part in the Summit, despite being a democratic nation. Alfonso Aguilar, president of the International Human Rights Group, suggested that ideological differences were likely a significant reason for the country's omission, since Guatemala is unapologetically pro-life."

In his speech at the Institute for Women's Health event, Giammattei elaborated on his passion for the pro-life movement and announced that Guatemala would be declared the pro-life capital of Ibero-America on Mar. 9, 2022: "Every individual deserves to have their lives protected, from conception to natural death. It is totally false that abortion is a human right. Any effort to try to impose abortion in a country is undue interference in international affairs."

"We seek to protect life and to prevent interference," he added. "We do not approve of abortion because of my faith but also my profession as a medical doctor. Life should be protected from conception."

Speaking to Evangelico Digital, Aaron Lara, president of the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family that pushed for Guatemala to become the pro-life capital of Latin America, reported that "President Alejandro Giammattei has made public the date of the declaration of Guatemala as the Pro-Life Capital of Ibero-America that the Ibero-American Congress will do, together with the unveiling of a monument which will mark this fact in history."

Guatemala's impending recognition as the pro-life capital of Latin America comes as the nation has made multiple moves to support the pro-life movement. Last year, Guatemala bowed out of an agreement that allowed Planned Parenthood to operate in the country after Giammattei expressed concerns about the organization's stance on abortion.

Upon reversing the agreement made by Guatemala's interior minister at the time, Giammattei declared that "I will not endorse in my administration the creation, registration or start-up of any organization that goes against life." Earlier this year, Guatemala joined the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women's Health and Strengthening the Family, a document signed by nearly three dozen countries worldwide declaring that "there is no international right to abortion."

"The adherence of Guatemala today to the Geneva Consensus is a clear message to the international community that there are many countries that recognize that there is a fundamental right, a human right, to life that must be guaranteed and defended and that any claim that there is already an international consensus in favor of abortion, as some sadly allege, it is totally false," Giammattei proclaimed at the ceremony where he signed the Geneva Consensus.

Additionally, Giammattei slammed the fact that "efforts to promote abortion are often made in the name of defending human rights," which he characterized as "absurd."

He added, "Without a legal, anthropological or scientific basis, some currents of thought make supposed rights, which are nothing other than the denial of the true inherent rights of the person."

While the United States originally signed on to the Declaration when it was first introduced during the latter part of the Trump administration, President Joe Biden told United Nations ambassadors that the U.S. "hereby discontinues our participation in the Geneva Consensus Declaration" shortly after taking office.

During the summer, Giammattei spearheaded the Public Policy for the Protection of Life and the Institutionality of the Family 2021-2032. The initiative seeks to advance policies designed to "attend to the immediate needs of protection of life from its conception, early childhood, childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood and older adulthood to protect the family as the basic unit of society."

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