UN Bureaucrats Claim “Backlash” Against Abortion Rights

By | October 6, 2022

NEW YORK, October 7 (C-Fam) In the General Assembly this week, top UN officials and human rights experts criticized what they see as a “backlash” against abortion and gender ideology.

Åsa Regnér, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women said, “Compounding forces threaten to undo decades of gain.” Regnér and other UN officials and rights experts met with diplomats to discuss issues affecting women in the social policy of the General Assembly, the first such meeting to take place fully in person since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Regnér presented the committee with her agency’s report on how governments are implementing the gender equality target of the Sustainable Development Goals. Her report included the legal status of abortion as a measure of progress on gender equality. This was highly controversial since abortion was not part of the Sustainable Development Goals in the first place.

Regnér was not the only UN bureaucrat to claim abortion as a right and to complain about the supposed backlash.

Gladys Acosta Vargas, the chairman of the committee which follows the implementation of the UN treaty on women’s issues, complained that the right to abortion had been “removed in some [in some countries].” She said her committee was “in the eye of the storm” when it came to promoting gender ideology and abortion.

The chairman of the UN working group on discrimination against women and girls, Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, was even more explicit in calling on countries to “constitutionalize” abortion as a “fundamental right” in their national constitutions.

Several pro-abortion Western countries emphasized their commitment to promoting abortion and homosexual and transgender issues in UN resolutions through terms like sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The delegate of the United Kingdom said that promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights was a “top priority” for her country. She highlighted the “critical importance of safe abortion” calling on countries to align their laws with the guidelines of the World Health Organization.

A representative of the European Union emphatically said that they would promote “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, including homosexual and transgender issues.

A Belgian delegate attacked religions and cultures that do not accept abortion and gender ideology as “fundamentalist ideologies.”

The debate so far in the third committee has been one-sided, with pro-abortion and pro-LGBT countries declaring their intention to promote these controversial social policies. Traditional countries generally do not engage in polemics during open debates. They will likely save their statements for when resolutions are negotiated behind closed doors, and when they are finally adopted by the whole General Assembly sometime in December.

The committee, which deals with social issues, will negotiate a dozen resolutions related to women’s issues where abortion and homosexual issues are debated each year. For most delegates it will be the first time they meet in person to negotiate a UN resolution. Still looming in everyone’s mind is the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the decision that established a right to abortion under the U.S. Constitution in 1973.

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