Holy See Pulls Out of Nairobi Summit, U.S. Leads Opposition to Abortion Agenda

By | November 14, 2019

NEW YORK, November 15 (C-Fam) From start to finish the Nairobi Summit that concluded today in Kenya was clouded by charges of illegitimacy. The Vatican withdrew from the conference and the United States led a coalition of countries criticizing the organizers for ignoring pro-life and pro-family concerns.

The Holy See announced last week, ahead of the conference, that it could not attend or participate in the conference marking the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development because of the “regrettable” decision of the UN population agency to conduct the entire affair outside official UN channels.

The uncommonly harsh statement lamented the lack of “transparent intergovernmental negotiations” and accused the agency of “conveying the misleading impression of “consensus” on the “Nairobi Statement” when no consensus was in fact even attempted.

The conference was organized secretly. Governments were selectively consulted about the outcome. Those with pro-life concerns were kept in the dark about how to participate. And pro-life organizations, including organizations that are accredited with the United Nations, were denied access to the conference.

“The Nairobi Summit” cannot be deemed a meeting requested by the United Nations or held under its auspices,” the Holy See statement concluded.

The U.S. government participated in the conference and submitted a commitment on gender equality that emphasized investing in programs “without compromising the inherent value of every human life – born and unborn.”

But on the final day of the conference, the U.S., along with 10 other countries, harshly criticized the organizers.

“Outcomes from this summit are not intergovernmentally negotiated, nor are they the result of a consensus process. As a result, they should not be considered normative, nor should they appear in future documents as intergovernmentally-agreed language,” the statement reads. It was joined by Brazil, Belarus, Egypt, Haiti, Hungary, Libya, Poland, Senegal, St. Lucia, and Uganda.

The statement lamented the UN agency’s tactics and insisted that the caveats on the topic of abortion included in the 1994 Cairo conference—that abortion is not an international right and that governments should help women avoid abortion—remained valid and should continue to guide UN policy and programming.

The Nairobi Summit is a bureaucratic initiative of the UN population agency and wealthy European governments to promote abortion, LGBT rights, and comprehensive sexuality education in poor countries.

Having repeatedly failed to secure sufficient support for these controversial issues through consensus building at the United Nations, wealthy governments have been using the UN population agency as a vehicle to promote them in poor countries.

The $1 billion agency used its considerable resources to commandeer several government ministries into supporting the conference and making commitments that support the UN agency’s efforts. At one point, it had even drafted a list of commitments on behalf of the member states of the African Union without their approval. The statement circulated as an official African Union document last month was scuttled when countries got wind of this.

The main outcome of the conference is the “Nairobi Statement on ICPD25: Accelerating the Promise.” The Statement is a list of 12 commitments on “sexual and reproductive health.” Governments and civil society organizations at the conference pledged to fund these through specific initiatives.

While most of the commitments are not controversial, and focus on goals such as ending maternal mortality and female genital mutilation, others include deceptive language designed to give the UN agency cover to promote abortion as a humanitarian right, LGBT rights, comprehensive sexuality education, and provide teenagers with access to contraception and abortion without parental consent.

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