Children Born of War Receive Unprecedented Attention in Security Council Debate

By | May 18, 2017

NEW YORK, May 19 (C-Fam) Two years after it first heard from advocates for children conceived as a result of wartime rape, the UN Security Council is giving such children much-needed international attention.

“Children born out of rape experience discrimination, exclusion and stigma,” said Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General, at the outset of the Security Council annual open debate on sexual violence in conflict on Monday. She was the first of many speakers who dedicated attention to these children as victims and survivors.

“Stigma kills,” said Under-Secretary-General and Acting Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Adama Dieng after describing how stigma from rape pushed women to seek the abortion of their children.

“Many women, men, and boys survive rape but not its social repercussions,” Dieng said as he highlighted the isolation and discrimination that all survivors of sexual violence experience.

Dieng went further and warned of the need to “go beyond minimizing stigma” and to ratchet up programs to “restore respect” for these children so they are integrated into society and becoming child soldiers or criminals does not end up being “their only prospect for the future.”

That abortion will prevent recruitment of these children as child soldiers is similar to the arguments made in domestic abortion debates, that aborting children born into certain social settings will reduce the crime rate.

Government denial, and then a multi-year campaign from abortion groups to establish abortion as a humanitarian right, have helped to make these children invisible and kept their protection and assistance off the international agenda for decades.

Participants in this week’s UN Security Council debate on Women, Peace, and Security, said the children must be assisted, protected, and reintegrated into society, and safeguarded from further exploitation by armed groups as child soldiers.

Member states never brought up abortion during the debate, but focused instead on prevention, support for victims, and ending their stigmatization.

The Security Council debate did not shut the door on the ambiguity that allows abortion groups to advance their agenda internationally.

The latest report of the Secretary General on sexual violence in conflict, like the debate in the Security Council, included an unprecedented focus on children conceived as a result of war rape. It also included the notion that aborting the child is a solution, complaining that a 16 year-old Eritrean victim of rape was not allowed to abort her child in Lybia.

Deputy Secretary General Mohamed referred to the provision of “emergency reproductive health care” in her speech, which could mean emergency obstetric care to help women who suffer from post-partum hemorrhaging or a botched abortion, or it could mean providing them with abortifacient drugs.

Moreover, Ms. Mina Jaf, a representative invited to address the Security Council by Uruguay represented the Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security which includes abortion advocates such as Amnesty, Global Justice Center, and Human Rights Watch.

Jaf emphasized the provision of “sexual and reproductive healthcare, such as abortions” twice in her speech. She also twice emphasized special protection for individuals who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual. But she did not mention children conceived as a result of rape. She did not mention children at all.

 

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