Editorial: Is It Time for UN Feminists to Pack it in?

By | April 19, 2018

Kate Gilmore, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Photo/Elma Okic)

NEW YORK, April 19 (C-Fam) It was a rather poignant moment; a feminist lamenting their lack of progress on abortion at the recently completed Commission on the Status of Women.

She said, “As a caucus we have been dissatisfied. If we are not going to move forward, this is a waste of our time as feminists. I have already had some conversations with UN Women and other groups that something has to change, because as I said, it is not worth my time and energy to come here and do this if we are left with less than nothing.”

How much more upset is she since we ended yet another commission on Friday with no document? The Commission on Population and Development ended last Friday afternoon with delegates agreeing that no agreement was possible. What were the issues? Abortion and national sovereignty.

For the Europeans, the long legacy of leftist politics lives on in their brand of feminism. They ardently spread the core tenet of their ideology, radical sexual autonomy, all over the world and most especially to impose it on African women. The Africans resisted, so did the Trump administration. The Europeans would rather have had no document than one that did not promote abortion. Fine. No document.

Here’s the thing. The feminists have spent a quarter century promoting abortion at the UN and they have not gotten even one syllable further than they did at the Cairo Conference in 1994. And how humiliating for them that they cannot come right out and ask for what they want; they have to use intentionally vague, aka sneaky, language, like reproductive health. But, they even have to fight tooth and nail to get their sneaky language agree to.

Almost everyone in this business admits that reproductive health includes abortion. So, when it is introduced into documents by the hard-left, and it is many times, pro-life NGOs and pro-life nations insist upon its removal. Failing that, they insist upon its replacement with less offending terms, like maternal health. Failing that, they insist upon qualifications that exclude abortion from the term.

And the feminists have to fight and fight every step of the way and, in the case of the Commission on Population and Development, end up with nothing. They seem willing to leave African women out in the cold unless they can get their pound of flesh—that of the innocent unborn child.

The feminist project to use the UN as a vehicle to advance their cause under the guise of human rights has always been a sketchy proposition. First, it violates national sovereignty to have something so controversial imposed by an international body. Even those who favor abortion, ought to be suspicious of it being imposed on the world from an office building in New York City. Second, the world does not agree with abortion on demand, like we have in the United States and which is the model UN feminists want to use for the whole world.

The feminists have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours trying to use the UN to impose abortion on the world and they have not moved their issue even a little bit in twenty-five years. Maybe they should heed the advice given by one feminist after their CSW loss and pack it in.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter