Weekly Standard: UNICEF Promoting Abortion

Of the more than 6 million children who died last year of preventable diseases and starvation, fully two-thirds - 4 million - could have been saved had UNICEF intervened and used its resources in their behalf.

But the United Nations agency was too busy promoting abortion, handing out condoms and running sex education programs to worry about the health of children the organization is supposed to protect.

That's the conclusion of an essay published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, according to the Weekly Standard.

The Lancet essay declares that "We, a group of concerned scientists and public health managers, call on ... UNICEF ... to act on behalf of children. Child survival must be put back on the agenda."

In the blistering editorial "No Abortion Left Behind" in its Feb. 2 issue, the Standard pulls no punches, laying the blame for this shocking situation squarely at the feet of Carol Bellamy, who was appointed to head the agency after President Clinton demanded she be given the job.

Bellamy succeeded the late Jim Grant, the widely respected UNICEF executive director who sought to bring to bear the agency's full resources to save the lives and improve the health of the Third World's children.

The Standard writes that under Bellamy the agency "has decided its job is not to save sick and hungry children, but to join the great march toward universal sex freedom - agitating for minors' access to condoms, requiring that refugee camps provide abortion services, and handing out sex-education manuals to grade-school students in the third world."

This was made clear in internal memos from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a lawyers' nongovernmental organization (NGO) that specializes in suing local and national governments that fail to allow unfettered access to abortion.

Austin Ruse, who heads the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, obtained a copy of these secret abortion-strategy memos late last year, which were then inserted into the Congressional Record by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., on Dec. 8.

The memos reveal exactly how the NGO abortion activists talk to each other behind closed doors. "There is a stealth quality to the work," one memo noted. "We are achieving incremental recognition of values without a huge amount of scrutiny from the opposition. These lower-profile victories will gradually put us in a strong position to assert a broad consensus around our assertions."

The shocking revelation of the NGO's duplicity infuriated the group, which sent a cease-and-desist letter to Austin Ruse after these embarrassing memos were made public.

The letter, the Standard wrote, "is hilarious in its arrogance and frankness." It states that the memos are "privileged communications, proprietary information, and trade secrets" and must be returned unused, since "disclosure of this material has caused, and further disclosure will cause CRR irreparable harm."

The "harm," according to the Standard, is in the exposure of the underhandedness of the "abortion activists' technique. Their legal briefs routinely cite phrases they themselves crafted in U.N. directives, international court decisions, and treaty-organization minutes."

Exposed also was their stealth strategy, which "consists primarily of inserting vague passages in as many international treaties, reports, and working papers as possible - and then getting the enforcement agencies and entities such as the European Court of Human Rights to interpret those passages to mean a universal right to abortion has been established."

The Standard discloses that even though U.N. documents are shot through with the phrase "reproductive rights," there is not a meaningful definition of "reproductive rights" in any official U.N. resolution.

In one draft for the 1999 report from the Cairo + 5 conference, for example, the phrase was used 47 times in the section on adolescents alone.

Despite the fact that the Center for Reproductive Rights has long maintained that the right to abortion is guaranteed by international law, the memos now admit that their strategy has so far failed to establish that assertion.

They also complain, "What good is all our work if the Bush administration can simply take it all away with the stroke of a pen?" as it did in reinstituting the ban on federal agencies' funding of any international organizations that promote abortion.

The animus directed at the Bush administration was obvious when, according to Douglas A. Sylva, the vice president of Ruse's group, the U.N.-backed European Population Forum this month blamed the United States for bringing, as one official put it, "near-collapse to international gatherings on children's rights, development and population by opposing any language that might allow for abortion."

The fundamental job of every international agency in coming years, the president of International Planned Parenthood explained, will be to fight the opponents of abortion by "discrediting their pseudo-science and unmasking their ideological motives. It is essential to demonstrate the truly dangerous consequences of their approach."

The international abortion movement has been provoked by the administration's determination to force UNICEF and the U.N. to follow the agency's original purposes instead of fanatically promoting the agenda of such groups as International Planned Parenthood.

The Standard notes that examples of fanaticism go on and on. UNESCO, the Standard charges, "has drifted so far into the abortion fight that an irritated Tommy Thompson, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, finally sent a letter this month to the U.N. asking what declarations such as "Governments should make abortion legal, safe, and affordable" have to do with UNESCO's supposed mission of promoting education, science and culture.

When Secretary of State Colin Powell cut off American funding for the United Nations Population Fund in 2002 - on the reasonable grounds that UNFPA was hopelessly implicated in China's forced-abortion policy - he was immediately attacked by E.U. development and humanitarian aid commissioner Poul Nielson for creating a worldwide "decency gap" in failing to help UNFPA spread international abortion rights.

The Standard editorial concludes: "Only zealotry and extremism can explain all this: the warping of every institution, every issue, and every occasion to concern abortion. The pro-abortion fanatics have taken over the entire international forum. And to achieve the ability of any woman - at any place, for any reason - to have an abortion, they are willing to pay any price."

Other articles:

UNICEF Goes From Trick-or-Treat to Turning Tricks

Planned Parenthood

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