New UN Health Committee Begins Work in 2012

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | November 28, 2011

The UN has appointed yet another expert committee. This one to tell the Secretary General whether countries are following his new guidelines on global health and how fast donor countries are handing over their share of a promised $40B to fund it.

International abortion advocates had pinned their hopes on inserting abortion rights into the UN Secretary General’s Global Health Strategy in 2010, but then two things thwarted their plan: a peer reviewed study undercutting the academic basis of their claim (that legal abortion reduces maternal death), and the prime minister of Canada who opposed international funding for abortion as a part of global maternal health programs (at the G-20 summit which his nation hosted).

Harper was appointed the co-chair of the 2010-2011 Accountability Commission that wrote the guidelines for the new strategy. Now the editor of the journal which published the maternal health study, Richard Horton, has been appointed co-chair of the Expert Review Group (ERG). The just-named ERG is to track “results and resources related to the Global Strategy and on progress in implementing this [Accountability] Commission’s recommendations.”

Horton told the New York Times he bucked strong pressure to quash an independent study by the University of Washington which showed WHO maternal health research as false and suffering poor methodology. The University of Washington’s Dr. Dean Jamison is also on the ERG. So is Carmen Barroso, IPPF’s western region director an aggressive abortion advocate.

Harper’s Accountability Commission released its anti-climactic report in May. The abortion agenda, such as it was, apparently neutralized by the presence of those who did not endorse it. It remains to be seen whether former outsiders like Horton and Jamison will remain in watchdog stance or be co-opted into an insider role. The committee will deliver an Annual Report of the ERG, of approximately 25 Pages (plus annexes), which is supposed to “highlight the key areas of progress and challenges in implementation of the accountability framework.”

One of the first programs the ERG will oversee is a controversial new global HPV vaccine initiative for girls in poor countries. But that is the subject of the next blog.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter