Born of Controversy, Youth Coalition is Emerging Voice at UN

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | 2014

NEW YORK, August 22 (C-Fam) In 2010 C-Fam personnel participated in a conference on youth sponsored by the UN Population Fund in Mexico. The conference was intended to inform the global conference on youth scheduled the following year in New York City. What C-Fam discovered and reported on at the time was a radical initiative that included pornographic exhibits.

C-Fam had drafted a “Youth Statement to the UN and the World” that was signed by 120,000 people including 57,000 young people from all over the world. It was decided to launch the statement at the Mexico conference under the ad hoc auspices of what C-Fam called the International Youth Coalition.

Deemed so successful, it was decided to keep the initiative going and a founding conference was organized in July 2011, a week of training in New York with talks from pro-life leaders Lila Rose of Live Action, Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life, former America’s Next Top Model contestant Leah Darrow, Catholic blogger Thomas Peters, and actors Jeffrey Azize and Michael Campo from The Human Experience film.

The nascent coalition was galvanized by what they saw as an egregious usurpation of the “voice of youth” purveyed by UN agencies such as UNFPA, claiming that all the world’s young people demanded legal and accessible abortion, comprehensive sexual education for children as young as ten years old, and policies encouraging homosexuality, promiscuity, and premarital sex.

In February 2014, the “IYc” came under the leadership of Mark Kowalewski, a former Army Intelligence soldier. He has focused on recruiting new talent to contribute to the coalition blog and brought on board ten talented youths from five countries–Australia, Canada, Columbia, Argentina, and the United States–writing in English and Spanish.

Canadian blogger Angell Lu-Lebel was born visually impaired. She wrote recently, “People have said to my parents, that it’s a shame they didn’t know about my disability sooner because abortion would have been the more merciful approach.” Lu-Lebel explained why this viewpoint is irrational and brings so much sorrow to the disabled who have so much to offer.

Austrailian blogger Xavier Bisits is an undergraduate from Oxford University and president of Cambridge Students for Life. He recently focused on what he sees as the hypocrisy of radical feminism and the political far left which ignores such women’s issues as damaging effects pornography. “Pornography promotes women-hating attitudes and employs vulnerable women to undertake degrading work, with a proven link to the sex trafficking industry,” Bisits says.

The coalition does more than speak out. In March of 2015, they will convene in New York for the annual Convention on the Status of Women. UN agencies have bankrolled an influx of young people to lobby UN delegates at previous meetings. The IYc, though small and not nearly as well funded, will rely on their deep conviction and the understanding each has gained about the complex issues during the year of blogging. Each coalition member is chosen after a competitive process and the best bloggers wins a one thousand dollar scholarship.

On Sunday, Pope Francis told Korean youth, “You are not only a part of the future of the Church; you are also a necessary and beloved part of the Church’s present. You are the present of the Church.”  Kowalewski says that is why the International Youth Coalition was founded. “We don’t have time to train for some future battle. It’s all on-the-job training. The threats to life and family never relent, and neither will we.”

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