News From United Nations

 

 

Pro-abortion forces fail again to advance their goal to establish abortion as fundamental human right worldwide, but keep pushing

 

By Scott Fischbach and Jeanne Head, RN
The 46th Session of the Commission on Population and Development (CPD) took place April 22–26 at the United Nations in New York City. The theme of this year’s conference was “New trends in migration: demographic aspects.”
Once again a document intended to help the most vulnerable became a platform for promoting anti-life ideology by the pro-abortion forces. And once again negotiations failed—forcing a “take it or leave it” text written by the chairman of the CPD.

While most of the delegations from around the world who took part in the intense negotiations on an “outcome document” concerning global migration wanted to work toward advancing the cause of migrants’ access to food, housing, education and safety, those who support abortion showed up in force, as always, to persuade them to do otherwise.

All of the usual supporters of abortion including the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) which dominated the meeting, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Catholics for Free Choice and others were there. They demanded that migrants have access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights—including “safe abortion” (which for them are code words for a right to abortion but which have never been interpreted in any UN negotiated document to include that right). And while they made a lot of noise, they did not make any real headway toward the establishment of abortion as a fundamental human right.

IPPF used the Commission on Population and Development meeting to announce the kick-off of their new Vision 2020 goals of establishing abortion as a human right worldwide. In the midst of this call for “more progress,” one of the main speakers, Nafis Sadik (former Executive Director of the UNFPA and Secretary General of the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development) complained about their lack of progress since Cairo and chided IPPF for being too “timid” in its goals. (See below.)

As these groups launched their latest campaign for more abortions, pro-life forces were busy working in coalition to ensure that the lack of progress abortion supporters had seen since the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) continued at the Commission on Population and Development!

Hours and hours of negotiations by U.N. delegates included several late-night sessions discussing the final document and attempting to get all countries to agree. The sought-after agreement never came to be and, as has become the habit, the final document was written by the chairman. A “chairman’s text” bypasses the negotiating process and does not carry the weight of a U.N. document to which all parties have agreed.

In the final chairman’s document, there are six references to “sexual and reproductive health (decreased from the proposed 13 or more), one to “reproductive rights” and one paragraph mentions “safe abortion in circumstances where such services are permitted by national law”.
Tne of these references go beyond the ICPD and cannot be interpreted to include a right to abortion. Note that a similar resolution on migrations in 2006 did not even mention reproductive health.
These references drew strong objections from Egypt speaking for the Arab group of countries, Nigeria, speaking for 34 African group countries, and several individual countries, including Bangladesh, Chile, El Salvador, the Holy See, Honduras, Hungary, Kenya, Malta, Poland, Sudan, Syria and Qatar. They issued strong statements stating that text was too heavy on sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights; that none of the language can be interpreted to include a right to abortion; and that it did not focus on the real needs of migrants.


In their statement, the Holy See said

“…we continue to believe that a resolution better focused on the specific needs of migrants and their human rights, . . . would have more effectively responded to the real needs of migrants around the world.

“While these fundamental human rights are largely left unaddressed in the text, we note instead an unbalanced focus on matters related to sexual or reproductive matters . . .” “ . . .Since human life begins at the moment of conception, the Holy See affirms that life must be defended and protected; and, accordingly, that it does not consider abortion to constitute a dimension of health care services, and that abortion can in no case be considered “safe”

Although the pro-life governments and non governmental organizations (NGOs) were able to again hold back advances by those who support abortion at this year’s conference, this was only a warm-up to many intense battles still to come.

The 20th Anniversary of the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development will be held in 2014. Although those who support abortion have not yet been able to establish abortion as a human right, they continue their aggressive efforts.
For example, a High Level Task Force of 25 “experts” for the 20th Anniversary of the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development have come together for a high-level panel to look beyond what was agreed to at the first ICPD. They announced a new drive for their agenda at a promotional kick-off event, co-sponsored by the governments of Finland and Mozambique and the Ford Foundation, on April 25th during the CPD.

The lengthy policy recommendations made by this high-level panel include abortion on demand, no parental involvement laws, no informed consent laws—in other words, abortion on demand for any and all reasons throughout the nine months of pregnancy.
In addition, there are numerous regional events planned for this purpose.
It is very clear that the push at the U.N. for a fundamental human right to abortion continues to be the ultimate goal.

We must continue our push to stop them. The year ahead will be grueling, but our hope is that we can remain vigilant in stopping any advances of those who seek to abort millions of unborn babies.

Source: NRLC News