UN Event Highlights the Importance of Family Stability

By | February 14, 2019

NEW YORK, February 15 (C-Fam) Member states and pro-family organizations hosted a panel discussion on the importance of family stability at UN headquarters this week.

“Policies to strengthen and protect the family are really a matter of life and death for hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Austin Ruse, the president of the Center for Family and Human Rights, publisher of the Friday Fax, and moderator of the event.

“The family is the most important and sometimes only source of social protection for over seventy percent of the world’s people,” Ruse said.

Andrei Dapkiunas, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, called on governments to develop policies that promote family values, marriage, fatherhood, and motherhood.

Egypt’s UN Ambassador, Mohamed Edrees, lamented attempts to marginalize the family at the United Nations.

“It is very disappointing to see that there are attempts to withdraw the theme of the family from the UN agenda, or to dilute for the sake of other controversial issues. These controversial issues don’t have any reference in international human rights law,” he said, referring to the LGBT agenda.

Annie Franklin, Director of International Activities for Family Watch International, highlighted how protection and support for the family is required by the most widely ratified international treaties.

Mark Regnerus, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, presented research on monogamous family norms. The research shows how they spread from Europe through the world because of their competitive advantage in generating wealth and wellbeing.

“Families don’t just benefit from social protection, they are social protection,” he said.

He also warned that new generations were failing to renew this social protection resource.

“It is possible we are living off the credit accrued from the marriages of our grandparents and our great-grandparents,” he said.

Susan Yoshihara, Senior Vice President for Research of the Center for Family and Human Rights, said the family was also essential to international stability.

The family is relied upon to “prevent and resolve conflict, provide resilient communities, and for rehabilitation after conflict,” she explained.

Yoshihara talked about Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad and her account of captivity by ISIS in “The Last Girl.” Before her capture, during her capture, and for her very escape, Yoshihara said, “the family was at the center of her experience.”

Yoshihara also blamed the “long siege against family formation” from the U.S. government and the abortion and family planning industry for global security threats.

These were instituted by John F. Kennedy ostensibly to make the world safer and to protect the environment. If anything, Yoshihara said, the world is less safe because of fertility decline.

Many countries have “closing windows of opportunities to use big armies.”  Their populations are shrinking, and they are becoming aggressive as a result.

The event, titled “The Importance of Family Stability to Social Protection and Achieving Sustainable Development,” was a side event of the UN Commission for Social Development and was hosted by the twenty-five UN member states of the Group of Friends of the Family. Civil Society for the Family, a coalition of over two-hundred organizations that promotes the family in international law and policy, co-sponsored the event. It can be watched on the UN website.

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