Biden Administration Wants More Powers for International Health Experts

By | May 12, 2022

NEW YORK, May 13 (C-Fam) The Biden administration intends to give the World Health Organization greater powers to define and monitor pandemic readiness policies, powers that will extend deep into American healthcare, and will be used to promote abortion.

The Biden administration proposes to establish an international monitoring committee of the World Health Organization to review efforts at pandemic readiness. The new pandemic preparedness mechanism will likely result in pressure on countries to allow and fund abortion as part of their pandemic preparedness strategy.

The World Health Organization routinely describes abortion as a human right and used the COVID-19 emergency to promote abortion. The new committee would give the international agency a monitoring role similar to human rights mechanisms that routinely pressure countries to liberalize their abortion laws and regulations.

The Biden plan is presented in a set of proposed amendments to International Health Regulations on pandemic readiness promulgated by the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the international health agency.

The amendments also weaken the ability of countries to craft their own pandemic preparedness policies and to object to decisions made by international experts in emergency situations, including what health services and personnel are deemed essential.

From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, World Health Organization experts exploited the emergency and confusion caused by the pandemic to promote abortion, including by designating abortion as an essential health service.

Even though the first guidelines to treat the COVID-19 novel coronavirus from the international health agency were ostensibly about preparing for and treating a respiratory condition, the guidelines also called for uninterrupted access to abortion and contraception as a matter of human rights law.

Agency experts later openly admitted that they made sure to include abortion and contraception in all their work to address the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes explicitly and sometimes through the euphemism “sexual and reproductive health.”

The Biden administration vowed to promote “sexual and reproductive health and rights” in international health policy, including throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. White House statements support giving money and political support for “sexual and reproductive health and rights” in order to “address the indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on health systems and vulnerable populations.”

Funding “sexual and reproductive health” is a way to avoid running afoul of the Helms Amendments, a U.S. law that prohibits the use of U.S. foreign aid for abortions abroad. Groups that promote and perform abortions abroad continue to receive U.S. funding simply by vowing not to use the U.S. portion of funding for abortion-related activity.

The Biden administration’s amendments to the International Health Regulations will be considered by the World Health Assembly at its next session later this month.

International Health Regulations are a set of standard rules to harmonize global public health policies. The rules are promulgated by the World Health Assembly through a mechanism established in a 2005 International Health Regulations resolution. Though the international agency and many countries consider the 2005 agreement binding, the Bush administration joined the regulations agreement without asking advice and consent from the U.S. Senate, as required by the U.S. Constitution.

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