UN Big Berates Pro-Lifer for “Misinformation”

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | April 11, 2025

NEW YORK, April 11 (C-Fam)  The head of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) berated a Canadian pro-lifer for her comments on abortion. This happened at an event in conjunction with the just-concluded UN Commission on Population and Development.

Pro-life advocate Josie Luetke of Campaign Life Coalition said, “If our goal is peace, how can we be perpetuating violence against preborn human beings through abortion, which sometimes involves the dismemberment of human beings in the womb?”

Dr. Natalia Kanem, Executive Director of UNFPA, denounced her comment as “a very dangerous thing to say,” adding that she had “never heard or seen [dismemberment abortion] happening” and that it would be “the opposite of what my noble profession tries to do, which is to uphold the sanctity of life.”

Kanem added that this was “misinformation and disinformation, which has led to deaths from measles in some of the most advanced health economies of the world.”

Dr. Pascale Allotey of the World Health Organization sat alongside the head of UNFPA, and she knows well that dismemberment abortions occur. Her interagency Human Reproduction Program published a 2023 clinical abortion guideline that discusses using “forceps to complete the evacuation of fetal parts” in surgical abortions after 14 weeks of gestation, with further guidance if not all parts can be located. Allotey did not move to tell Kanem that the Canadian pro-lifer was right and not spreading misinformation.

At multiple events throughout the Commission, warnings about “misinformation and disinformation” were raised, often to preemptively silence pro-life and pro-family messages and promote abortion.

An event on “Science integrity in SRHR” hosted by the WHO referred to reports that misinformation about abortion is giving rise to restrictive laws around the world, particularly in the U.S. and in African countries.  However, the examples of “misinformation” used as examples are dubious.  For example, the phrase “late-term abortion” is characterized as having “no medical meaning” by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).  Yet ACOG routinely uses the terminology of “trimesters” in pregnancy, despite the fact that this framing emerged in a legal context, not a medical one, in the now-overturned Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion throughout the U.S.  “Medical meaning,” like “misinformation,” have become increasingly subjective.

Some claims made during the CPD were simply false and easy to refute. The pro-abortion organization She Decides announced that “78 nations stood united, in support of [sexual and reproductive health and rights].”  In fact, the 78 nation statement did not refer to “sexual and reproductive health and rights” at all, but used the language agreed to three decades ago at the International Conference on Population and Development: “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”  The distinction may sound insignificant, but it is not: the agreed language does not include abortion as a right and urges countries to provide women with alternatives to abortion.  In contrast, the SRHR terminology has never been agreed to internationally and was instead defined by activists as including abortion.

International consensus continues to reject this terminology, and abortion is not an internationally agreed human rights, despite numerous misinformed claims to the contrary.

The Commission ended in deadlock and no document was produced. This is viewed as a defeat for the pro-abortion side.

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