UN Agency for Children to Promote Sexual Autonomy

By | September 2, 2021

NEW YORK, September 3 (C-Fam) The UN agency for children, UNICEF, is revamping its strategic framework to promote sexual autonomy for children

UNICEF released a new “Results Framework” to track progress on its overall work last month. It includes three indicators for “sexual and reproductive health” that measure the ability of children and adolescents to make decisions about these issues without parental consent.

Adding sexual health and information for children to the work of UNICEF would dramatically increase the availability of funds and human resources for UN agencies to promote a controversial sexual rights agenda, that includes abortion and LGBT rights.

The internal UNICEF document is part of the ongoing work of the Executive Board of the agency to adopt a new strategic plan this month. It includes a detailed set of indicators to plan and measure progress on the agency’s goals.

The indicators would measure the ability of adolescents to make autonomous decisions about their sexuality and the presence of sexuality education and sexual health services for children in schools.

Under the new plans, UNICEF would measure the “proportion of women aged 15 to 19 years who make their own informed decisions regarding sexual relations, contraceptive use and reproductive health care” as well as the “number of countries integrating adolescent health priorities, including sexual and reproductive health, in primary health care services or through school and digital platforms.”

Both indicators are already being tracked by other UN agencies, including UN Women and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), who look at the presence of “comprehensive sexuality education” in school curricula as a measure of progress.

These agencies are currently promoting and developing media applications to deliver comprehensive sexuality education to children directly on their digital devices, in a confidential manner that would undermine parental supervision in this area of children’s lives.

UNICEF, with a $7 billion annual budget, is a much larger agency with a greater reach than either UN Women or UNFPA, whose budgets in recent years have fallen well short of $1 billion annually. Its wide portfolio includes making vaccines available in poorest regions of the world and addressing lack of access to water and sanitation, which is responsible for the deaths of nearly 500,000 children each year.

The new UNICEF framework also adds an indicator for “reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health interventions.” This indicator was developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to add “reproductive health” as part of what are considered essential health services for purposes of universal health coverage, a growing focus of global health policies.

The reproductive health component of the indicator is measured by the WHO by looking at the “need for family planning satisfied with modern methods.” This indicator also duplicates the work of UNFPA to promote the use of contraception by women who do not want to use contraception for health, religious, or other reasons.

The draft strategic plan under consideration added sexual and reproductive health to the workplan of the agency for the first time in its history, as reported last month in the Friday Fax. The results framework further fleshes out the kind of work the agency is expected to carry out under the rubric of sexual and reproductive health.

Delegations on the UNICEF executive board who are traditionally opposed to controversial social policies include Djibouti and Cameroon from the African Region, Pakistan and Bangladesh from Asia, and the Russian Federation.

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