Two huge wins at the United Nations
by Austin Ruse, president of C-Fam
The United Nations met for an intense two-week negotiation that ended on Friday, March 23, at something called the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). It is the biggest and craziest meeting at the UN all year, chock-a-block with nutty abortion and homosexual advocates.
And we won.
The final document has NO NEW
COMMITMENTS on abortion or homosexual
rights.
The final document does not include "safe abortion".
The document does not recognize the concept of "family
diversity", which is code for homosexual marriage.
Sexual orientation and gender identity was taken OUT of
the document.
"Women in all their diversity", code for transgenderism,
was removed from this document!
Though the document includes "reproductive health",
which we oppose, the reference includes a qualification which
excludes abortion.
Some among the pro-life coalition at the UN thought such a victory was not possible, that delegations did not have the political will to resist. But, they did. C-Fam (the Center for Family and Human Rights) has never accepted defeatism. We know delegations want to resist the dominant leftism of the UN bureaucracy and the governments of the European Union.
And we beat them again
It was Friday afternoon, April 13, and another remarkable thing happened at the UN.
After weeks of formal and informal negotiation, the 51st session of the UN Commission on Population and Development ended WITHOUT A DOCUMENT. This massive UN negotiation that intended to produce a document ENDED IN STALEMATE.
Why did this happen? Because of vigilant pro-lifers, including C-Fam, insisting (1) that "comprehensive sexuality education" be taken out of the document; (2) that "reproductive health" be qualified with pro-life language; and (3) that national sovereignty must be in the document. National sovereignty protects government from UN radicals who want to impose abortion on their countries.
These were deal-killers for our side. The radical Europeans and UN bureaucrats were furious. This is their second defeat in a couple months. Recall, the radicals lost the negotiation at the Commission on the Status of Women, thanks to C-Fam's amazing team and our allies in other pro-life groups and the very brave UN delegates.
Feminist dismay
It was a rather poignant moment - a feminist lamented her side's lack of progress on abortion at the 62nd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), held during March 12-23.
She said, "As a caucus we have been dissatisfied. If we are not going to move forward, this is a waste of our time as feminists. I have already had some conversations with UN Women and other groups that something has to change, because as I said, it is not worth my time and energy to come here and do this if we are left with less than nothing."
How much more upset is she since we ended yet another commission on Friday, April 13, with no document? The UN Commission on Population and Development ended on that afternoon with delegates agreeing that no agreement was possible.
For the Europeans, the long legacy of leftist politics lives on in their brand of feminism. They ardently spread the core tenet of their ideology, radical sexual autonomy, all over the world and most especially to impose it on African women.
The Africans resisted, so did the U.S. Trump administration. The Europeans would rather have had no document than one that did not promote abortion. Fine. No document.
Here's the thing. The feminists have spent a quarter century promoting abortion at the UN and they have not got even one syllable further than they did at the Cairo Conference in 1994.
And how humiliating for them that they cannot come right out and ask for what they want! They have to use intentionally vague, aka sneaky, language, like "reproductive health". But, they even have to fight tooth-and-nail to get their sneaky language agreed upon.
Almost everyone in this business admits that reproductive health includes abortion. So, when it is introduced into documents by the hard-left, and it is many times, pro-life NGOs and prolife nations insist upon its removal. Failing that, they insist upon its replacement with less offending terms, like maternal health. Failing that, they insist upon qualifications that exclude abortion from the term.
And the feminists have to fight and fight every step of the way and, in the case of the recent Commission on Population and Development, end up with nothing. They seem willing to leave African women out in the cold unless they can get their pound of flesh - that of the innocent unborn child.
The feminist project to use the UN as a vehicle to advance their cause under the guise of human rights has always been a sketchy proposition.
First, it violates national sovereignty to have something so controversial imposed by an international body. Even those who favour abortion, ought to be suspicious of its being imposed on the world from an office building in New York City.
Second, the world does not agree with abortion on demand, such as we have in the United States and which is the model that UN feminists want to use for the whole world.
The feminists have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours trying to use the UN to impose abortion on the world and they have not moved their issue even a little bit in 25 years.
Austin Ruse is president of the USA's Center for Family and
Human Rights (C-Fam).
