Abortion Does Not Fit With UN Reform

By Iulia-Elena Cazan

NEW YORK, August 8 (C-Fam) Amid increasing skepticism of the UN’s relevance and the scope of multilateralism more broadly, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched a system-wide reform, also known as the UN-80 initiative, hoping to improve efficiency and “reassert the value of multilateralism” through mandate review and organizational restructuring.

Despite these ongoing efforts to restore public and governmental trust, the UN bureaucracy continues to overstep its mandate by carrying out a controversial normative agenda that promotes abortion and gender ideology, issues that have never been approved by the UN General Assembly.

At a recent UN-reform meeting, Guterres admitted the UN is collapsing under its own weight, criticizing the ever-growing stream of resolutions, meetings, and mandates that are “difficult to implement” and pushing the UN staff “to a breaking point.” Guterres described the UN mandate landscape as “opaque,” and conceded that “there is no easy way to know what already exists or what has been adopted across different [UN] bodies.”

Guterres said the UN currently oversees over 40,000 resolutions with texts getting longer and longer, and that only “one out of every ten dollars of the regular budgets goes to direct services costs, with indirect services costs pushing for a total that is much higher.”

At the same time, Guterres emphasized that UN80 will not diminish UN’s focus on human rights, will not remove its gender strategies, and that “all UN80 initiatives need to be instruments to strengthen the implementation of Agenda 2030 and the Pact of the Future.”

The 2030 Agenda has become increasingly controversial at the UN. In March, the US rejected and “denounced” the 2030 Agenda, flagging that it promotes a vision of human rights that affirms gender ideology, among other controversial ideas.

During a previous UN80 meeting, a US representative told Guterres that the “UN must refocus on effective delivery of core purposes,” a statement that aligns with previous US statements criticizing UN agencies for straying away from their original mandate through ideological overreach.

Earlier this year, the US told UNICEF that it should “focus on its core mandate” and rejected any “references to concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender ideology, and abortion” in the UNICEF strategic plan. The US expressed similar concerns to UNFPA and withdrew its funding from the agency.

In response to feedback from member states, Guterres emphasized that the UN80 is not a process of going “back to basics,” a sentiment shared by the European Union, which often promotes the more controversial resolutions at the UN. The EU said that the reform process should not come “at the expense of its normative agenda.”

Conservative government and civil society leaders have long criticized the UN for expanding its understanding of human rights beyond what was agreed to by member states in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and, thus, straying away from its original focus on peace, security, and development.

At a 2023 international forum that brought together key conservative figures from around the world, several keynote speakers expressed concern that the new interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) not only dilutes the original vision of the Declaration but that some of the “new rights” the UN now advocates for contradict the rights spelled out in the document, as is the case with the right to life mentioned in Article 3 of UDHR.

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