Biden Will Try to Break UN Stalemate on LGBT Issues and Abortion

By | April 22, 2022

NEW YORK, April 22 (C-Fam) All eyes will be on the Biden administration next week, as it attempts to break the deadlock in UN social policy debates about abortion, LGBT issues, and sexual mores generally at the UN Commission on Population and Development.

Despite marginal bureaucratic victories for the sexual left at the United Nations, social policy debates have remained the same for the past twenty years. UN member states have rejected any international obligations with regards to abortion and LGBT issues, and they have repeatedly rejected explicit sex education programs of the kind available in western nations. This, despite massive amounts of lobbying and programming from western nations.

The deadlock in UN social policy negotiations is nowhere more visible than at the Commission on Population and Development which meets annually since the 1960s to discuss population issues, including abortion and family planning policies. Since 2014, the Commission has failed to adopt a substantive resolution six times, reaching an agreement only in 2021 and 2016.

Negotiations on an agreement about economic growth and population issues are ongoing, with delegations taking sides along the same lines as in past years. The disagreements are expected to continue deep into the night this weekend and all next week, all the way to the wire next Friday, when the Commission is scheduled to adopt the agreement.

On one side, Western countries and their allies want an agreement that promotes liberal sexual mores, including LGBT policies, abortion-on-demand, and comprehensive sexuality education, alongside traditional UN-style population control policies centered on abortion and contraception for young people. On the other, traditional countries from Asia, the Middle East and Africa oppose these policies and want an agreement more focused on protection of the family and economic development.

Western countries also want to downplay the sovereign prerogative of countries to adapt UN policies to their own national cultures and traditions. They claim that any attempt to assert sovereign prerogatives is a way to avoid human rights obligations. More traditionally minded countries, for their part, insist on having language in the agreement that explicitly affirms the “sovereign right” of countries to implement UN population policies in line with national priorities, and in full respect of local cultures and religion. This kind of language has widely been used in UN policy for decades and is understood to negate any obligations with regard to controversial sexual mores.

So far, the Biden administration has been unable to break open this intractable stalemate about sovereignty and sexual mores. But there have been signs that resistance to liberal sexual mores is weakening. Delegates familiar with the negotiations have told the Friday Fax that traditional countries have not been as vocal as in the past and fear that the extra pressure from the Biden administration may lead to the collapse of all resistance to the sexual agenda.

Even though liberal western countries have failed to make significant normative progress in UN agreements, at the policy and program level, the UN bureaucracy has increasingly become a channel for the leftist sexual policies of wealthy Western countries, including sexual autonomy for children, abortion without parental consent for girls as young as ten, and explicit comprehensive sexuality education for children younger than five. Western countries want to legitimize these developments by having UN agreements, like the resolution of the commission expected to be adopted next week, to endorse these policies.

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