C-Fam’s Worst Moments for Life and Family 2014

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | January 2, 2015

NEW YORK, January 2 (C-Fam) Unlike its predecessor, 2104 was not a quiet year for life and family. We witnessed a number of new negative developments. The episodes below mostly involve rogue UN experts and officials. While a normative change on abortion and sexual orientation issues is not yet on the horizon, here are some examples of what the sexual left wants to do.

  1. Secretary General Launches Campaign for Abortion in War Torn Areas

This spring, the Secretary General launched possibly the most insidious initiative to ever come out of the United Nations. In a new guidance note he instructs UN officials and personnel in war torn areas to leverage the power of the United Nations to change abortion laws. They want to use conflict as a tool for social engineering. Just when countries are at their most vulnerable, abortion groups want to go in with their abortion kits. Never mind the real needs of women, and the absence of any health infrastructure to deal with the complications of abortion methods so dangerous they are banned in wealthy countries. That’s right! Kill the babies first, then worry about the women. C-Fam’s Susan Yoshihara saw it coming at CSW two years ago, when nobody suspected anything. Over time, insiders at the UN and the U.S. State Department confirmed her predictions. This is a complete betrayal of trust and an abject moral failure.

  1. UN Experts Gang up on Vatican Because of Doctrine on Abortion, Homosexuality

There is not international right to abortion or to social acceptance of homosexuality. But if you rely on UN committees to know about international law you would never know. In January, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child told Vatican representatives that Church teaching stigmatizes young girls who have abortions and children who identify as gay or lesbian. In May, the UN Committee Against Torture told the Vatican that Church teaching on abortion was a form of torture. Committees. C-Fam’s Wendy Wright testified at a congressional hearing about the dangers of ratifying UN treaties when UN committees abuse their position to promote harmful social policies. Abortion and LGBT groups are furious that the Vatican continues to block their advance internationally. C-Fam launched an online campaign to support the Holy See and collected over 120,000 signatures in a matter of weeks.

  1. Human Rights Council Forces Another Resolution on Sexual Orientation

Until this year, their only achievement of supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual (LGBT) rights was a resolution of the Human Rights Council in Geneva that resulted in a study from the UN bureaucracy on violence and discrimination on individuals who identify as LGBT. In September the Council narrowly passed a resolution that asks the UN bureaucrats to update the 2011 study. The 54 member states that make up the Human Rights Council do not speak for the whole United Nations. A similar initiative would never fly in New York. As the 2011 study made it abundantly clear, this was never about violence and discrimination but about special new rights for individuals who identify as LGBT, like legal recognition of same-sex relationships, sex change, and special protections above and beyond those afforded to all persons.

  1. UN Human Rights Council Becomes Abortion and LGBT Echo Chamber

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) has become an echo chamber for the voices of leftist nations that promote abortion and homosexuality, to the detriment of human rights and the United Nations. This is an old story in a new setting. The UPR is a new mechanism at the Human Rights Council in Geneva to review the human rights record of all UN member states in turn. It concluded its first cycle in 2012, and after two years of analysis the conclusions are in. 25% of all recommendations are about sexual and reproductive health. C-Fam’s Rebecca Oas broke down the data to show dozens of instances where countries have been pressured to make abortion legal, and hundreds where countries have been told to recognize aspects of the LGBT agenda none of which appear in any human rights treaty. But there has not been one single instance where a country has been reprimanded for perpetrating forced abortions or sterilizations. Unsurprisingly, these recommendations all originate from affluent leftist nations in Europe and Scandinavia. These same countries also finance organizations that echo their views in the Human Rights Council chamber. So much for diversity.

  1. New UN Development Goals Leave Out Abortion, Keep Funding Abortion Groups

Abortion groups didn’t get all they wanted from the latest round of negotiations on UN development goals, but they are still going to get a whole lot of money as things stand. Governments will continue to fund a global abortion lobby for the next 15 years under the rubric of “sexual and reproductive health.” This rubric includes a lot of abortion and contraception, and very little else. Unless countries decide to spend money on making pregnancy and childbirth safe, instead of preventing pregnancy and childbirth altogether, maternal health will be relegated to an afterthought in the post-2015 development agenda. Unborn children and mothers will suffer and die as a result. C-Fam has been lobbying all year to bring the focus back to improving maternal health as opposed to scaling up investments for abortion groups and contraception.

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