UN Agencies Ignore General Assembly, Promote Radical Agenda in 2022

By | December 22, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 23 (C-Fam) At the UN General Assembly, abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, and comprehensive sexuality education are not supported by consensus and tend to provoke strong opposition.  Even though there is no consensus on these issues among UN Member States, the UN’s specialized agencies have become increasingly aggressive in promoting them.

The most extreme example of agency overreach in 2022 was the World Health Organization’s publication of a guideline on “safe abortion.” It urged countries to remove all legal restrictions on abortion, limit medical providers’ conscience rights, and provide abortion pills by telemedicine.  The experts the WHO consulted to help develop the guideline were predominantly drawn from abortion advocacy groups.

The WHO also announced its plan to update its “gender mainstreaming” manual to reflect its position that gender is not a male-female binary, but rather “exists on a continuum.”

At the end of last year, U.S. President Joe Biden appointed Catherine Russell to be the new head of UNICEF.  Russell has a long history of promoting abortion and the controversial term “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” or SRHR, in international policy.  UNICEF hosts a global education initiative called “Education Cannot Wait,” which promotes SRHR and comprehensive sexuality education for children.

Specifically, the “Education Cannot Wait” materials point stakeholders toward the guidelines on sexuality education published by UNESCO, the UN agency with a focus on education.  In September, the UN hosted a summit on education where participants called for sexuality education to begin as young as 2 years of age, and for the upending of traditional social norms.

UN Women, the agency focused on promoting women’s rights and gender equality, has drawn complaints from pro-life and pro-family civil society organizations due to increasingly aggressive gatekeeping around participation in the annual Commission on the Status of Women.  The NGO Committee which operates under the UN Women umbrella has issued guidelines requiring organizations to agree to not use “offensive language” relating to issues including sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.  If interpreted strictly, these guidelines could result in the exclusion of conservative organizations from hosting events or participating fully in the commission.

Finally, the UN Population Fund, or UNFPA, continues to use deceptive statistics to promote the false notion that there is a vast unsatisfied demand for contraceptives in the developing world, and that investing billions of dollars in family planning is necessary to save women’s lives, despite increasing evidence that access to modern methods is approaching saturation.

UNFPA’s annual flagship report downplayed longstanding consensus that abortion laws are solely to be determined by national governments, stating that “human rights norms increasingly affect the scope of national legislation.”  Abortion has never been accepted as an international human right.  The report also says that “some people who do not identify as women” are at risk of unintended pregnancy.

UNFPA also issued a report marking the second anniversary of the 2019 Nairobi Summit in which it declared “sexual and reproductive justice” as the way to deliver the commitments from the summit.  “Reproductive justice” is a term that originated in the U.S. among black pro-abortion activists.  They framed abortion access as not only a human right, but also a racial justice issue, with an emphasis on ensuring that taxpayer funds would cover abortions.  Like other language framing abortion as a human right, “reproductive justice” has never been approved by the UN General Assembly.

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