UN Diplomats And Officials Advance Aggressive Pro-Family Positions At CSD / Sadik Outlines Coordinated Plan For Making Abortion a Universal Human Right

By Austin Ruse | February 21, 1998

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) In words rarely spoken by UN diplomats in official UN settings, the temporary working group chairman of the 135-member Group of 77, which represents developing-world countries, called this week for the UN to focus more closely on the concerns of the family and their central role in solving contemporary social pathologies. Speaking to a packed session of the Commission on Social Development (CSD), Mochamad Hidayat of Indonesia called for the UN to “mainstream the family perspective.”

Mainstreaming the family perspective directly echoes and challenges the effort by radical feminists in recent years to “mainstream the gender perspective.” If the G-77 wish is agreed to, the UN would be required to consider the family’s needs as a unit in all questions of economic and social development. Moreover, it would ensure the UN would have to evaluate how all its programs would impact the family.

Speaking at the same session, Pino Arlacchi, Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, said that “dysfunctional family life, rather than poverty, is one of the most significant factors in predisposing an individual to take drugs.” Arlacchi said it is healthy families that provide a shield against drug use.

Pro-family observers say they have never seen such cohesion among pro-family advocates at UN conferences, or so much support from UN diplomats and officials.

 

Sadik Outlines Coordinated Plan For Making Abortion a Universal Human Right

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) In a January 30 statement to the 18th Session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Dr. Nafis Sadik, the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), discussed how UNFPA is collaborating with other UN agencies and feminist NGOs to define and enforce women’s “sexual and reproductive health” as a universal human right. By official UN definition, “reproductive health” includes access to abortion.

Sadik disclosed that UNFPA is leading “a concerted effort” to “integrate” sexual and reproductive health into “the human rights treaty monitoring process.” Calling the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women “an indispensable instrument for holding governments legally accountable,” she backed CEDAW’s proposal to use Article 12 of the Convention “to spell out countries’ obligations with regard to…sexual and reproductive health.”

This co-ordinated bid to supercede national sovereignty regarding access to abortion has arisen from the December 1996 Roundtable on Human Rights Treaty Bodies’ Approaches to Women’s Health. Representatives from UNFPA, CEDAW, the Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, all six UN human rights treaty bodies, and feminist NGOs attended the meeting.

Since the meeting, Sadik reported, an “informal inter-agency working group of gender and human rights focal points” has continued to meet regularly.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter