Congressmen Demand Abortion in UN Document at CSW

By | March 16, 2018

NEW YORK, March 16 (C-Fam) A letter from 38 members of the United States House of Representatives demonstrates how desperate advocates are to maintain coded abortion language in a document under negotiation this week at the UN.

The annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) began in New York on Monday and abortion advocates are keen to maintain the phrase “reproductive health” in the non-binding document.

In the letter, revealingly circulated by abortion giant Planned Parenthood, the relatively small number of Congressmen calls on the U.S. delegation to work toward “actionable policies” related to “reproductive health services.” The letter warns against attempts to “roll back international commitments that are rooted in human rights…”

The letter accuses the Trump administration with attempting to “undermine existing commitments, including your attempts to remove references to sexual and reproductive health services and reproductive rights.”

The fight at the UN over “reproductive health” is more than twenty years old. The term was created by abortion advocates as a way to advance abortion without using the word abortion, and as a way to fool even pro-life advocates. The term was also advanced as a way to create a new abortion norm, an effort that has largely failed as there is no such agreement among the nations of the world.

Pro-life leaders at the UN have consistently resisted the term since, in the Cairo Platform of Action, the phrase overtly includes abortion, though with important qualifiers.

As of this writing, the CSW document contains several references to “reproductive health” though several delegations, including the U.S., have called for it to be deleted. This has gotten abortion advocates in the U.S. Congress in a roil.

The letter also warns Ambassador Haley against attempting to rollback advances in homosexual rights. In fact, there has been virtually no advance in rights exclusively for homosexuals at the UN. People with same-sex attraction are already covered by all human rights treaties. For decades, LGBT advocates have attempted to create a new stand-alone category of nondiscrimination related to “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI). However, SOGI appears in no binding documents and only in a few documents calling for research into violence. It is not expected that homosexual rights will appear in the document under negotiation.

The letter also takes a swipe at C-Fam (publisher of the Friday Fax), a UN-accredited research institute that has been active in these debates for twenty years. C-Fam is a close adviser to a few dozen delegations to the UN. The Congressmen cite the widely-discredited Southern Poverty Law Center that claims C-Fam is a “hate-group” for assisting the government of Belize in understanding its treaty obligations with regard to “sodomy.” C-Fam’s executive vice president served on the U.S. delegation to the CSW last year.

The annual meeting of CSW is among the most controversial of the year as it brings in thousands of activists who view it as the vehicle to advance a radical version of feminism in social policies. The document produced, however, has no binding effect and governments are free to ignore its agreed-upon conclusions.

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