UN Honors Planned Parenthood Abortion Activist with Population Award

By | June 30, 2016

Planned Parenthood executive Carmen Barroso

NEW YORK, July 1 (C-Fam) The United Nations awarded longtime Planned Parenthood executive Carmen Barroso for her work promoting “sexual and reproductive health and rights” at a ceremony at UN headquarters last week.

The iconic abortion advocate dedicated the award to doctors and health providers who perform illegal abortions and explained how the motivation for her life’s work was personal. Dancing to a Brazilian tune as she received the UN Population Award, Barroso called these doctors “unsung heroes.”

The head of the UN Population Fund Babtunde Osotimehin praised Barroso for 40 years of advocacy for “sexual and reproductive health and rights, including the right of adolescents to comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health services.”

Barroso said she became pregnant early in her marriage. Life under the Brazil’s military regime was “too much to bear,” she said, adding that she and her husband wanted to put off having a family in order to pursue the “small pleasures of life” as well as “freedom and social justice.”

She was “not comfortable with the daily dose” of hormonal contraceptives so she switched to an intra-uterine devise, which led to “copious periods with cramps.” While on the IUD she missed her period.

“I froze with horror,” she exclaimed loudly. “The castle of my future came crumbling down,” adding that she was in such a state that she began feeling as if her husband was a “monster inseminator” who had “lost a mischievous sperm” that was now assaulting her “defenseless ovaries.”

“There was only one way out,” she concluded. “Interrupt the pregnancy.”

Barroso said she found a “very religious” doctor, but one “who saw that I was in serious trouble.” He gave her medication and told her to go to the hospital and say it was a miscarriage, and to avoid questions.

The doctor told her the medication was necessary because the IUD had been dislocated, but Barroso believes to this day that he made all that up “to justify himself to do something against his belief.”

Barroso said her “so-called miscarriage” was “hell” but concluded it was overall necessary. “I will be eternally grateful. My husband and I were able to realize the future we dreamed of.”

The United Nations Population Award is given each year to individuals or organizations in recognition of “the most outstanding contribution to increasing the awareness of population questions or to their solution.”

The first UN Population Award in 1983 went to Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister responsible for implementing coercive population control programs in India, and Qian Xinzhong, the Health Minister of China who created the one-child policy. More recently Bill and Melinda Gates received the award for investing unprecedented sums in fertility policies in Africa and East Asia.

Before directing Planned Parenthood for the Western hemisphere, a post she recently left, Barroso was a director at the MacArthur Foundation, where she worked to link the population control and reproductive health agendas.

She has gone as far as claiming that “Providing family planning for those who want it could provide up to 29 percent of needed reductions in carbon emissions,” even though UN Population experts have shot down similar claims.

Barroso is a member of the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health, and chairs the Independent Expert Review Group of the Global Strategy on Women and Children’s Health appointed by the UN Secretary General.

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