UN Official Says “F-You” to Trump and Pro-Life Delegations

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | April 11, 2019

WASHINGTON DC, April 12 (C-Fam) Spokespersons for two UN agencies outlined a plan to counter the U.S. pro-life position by seeking a new international consensus on sexual rights without the consent of sovereign states.

At a meeting in Washington, D.C., Carmen Barroso referred to the Trump administration as “the egregious power next door.”  Barroso is co-chair, Gender and Rights Advocacy Group, at the Special Program of Research, Development, and Training in Human Reproduction at the World Health Organization.

“We are facing fierce opposition as Carmen was saying,” UNFPA spokesman Arthur Erken added. “So we have two choices: either you stay silent because you’re too afraid to rock the boat, or you say—F-You—we are actually going to go out [of UN premises] and fight for this right because we really believe that this is the right thing to do.”

Erken was referring to a plan to hold a major conference in Nairobi later this year to “bring everyone together because we want everyone to show their colors” on the divisive issues. The conference is to take place near the 25thanniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo.

In defiance of current U.S. policy which emphasizes sexual risk avoidance for young people rather than sexual rights, Erken said comprehensive sexuality education, which the U.S. opposes, “needs to be coming out very very strong in Nairobi.” Sexual rights, which the U.S. also opposes, is “the other battleground that we are facing.”

Erken, who was a young staffer at the Cairo conference, complained that the consensus from Cairo included protection for national sovereignty and religion. “The one sentence that is there was that everything in the Program of Action is subject to national laws and religious beliefs.” That must now be reversed, he said, in a return to the “spirit” of Cairo and not the actual text.

“We now have many more potential allies than we had in Cairo,” Barroso said, “but one important ally was the U.S. government, and of course it’s in the other camp. Hopefully 2020 will change that.” Barroso said of the “masses of disenfranchised people” in the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere, “They’re electing fascists!”

The UN senior staffers made it clear that the plan was a resistance to U.S. voters who put Republicans in office. “ICPD could not take place if let’s say Bill Clinton wasn’t president in the U.S.,” Erken said. “The MDGs that followed,” when George W. Bush was in office, “were not a very progressive agenda…The SDGs is [sic] far more progressive,” he went on, “at a time when we had Barak Obama as president.  And I can guarantee you we would have had a different conversation if the SDGs were happening to be discussed today.”

Erken said that the direction at Nairobi will not come from nations so much as from special interest activists “plowing ahead because you’re on the right side of history.”  He said, “Laws in the country don’t change because politicians think it’s a good idea…please use your social media capacity to organize and bring these forces out.”

Even without the consent of the U.S., a donor nation, or from traditional, recipient nations, Erken said “Nairobi is about commitments,” and that “some kind of consensus will come out of Nairobi” that will last for another decade: “I don’t foresee another population conference such as this in the next ten years.”

 

 

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter