Pleading for the unborn and
their mothers at the UN
by Denise Mountenay
The United Nations' largest annual gathering to promote "gender equality and women's empowerment" took place from March 11 to 22, 2024, in the UN's New York headquarters.
The priority theme of the 68th annual UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68) was: "Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective".
Owing to the former Covid restrictions fiasco and my recent personal relocation to Mexico, it has been five years since our Endeavor Forum team last attended this UN gathering. The last session we attended, in 2019, had been a great success. We hosted a well-attended side-event with the UN member-state of Samoa graciously co-sponsoring our event inside the UN.
Our side-event featured two eminent guest speakers. Christina Francis, MD, who is CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), reminded us of the humanity of children in the womb, before birth, and how legalising abortion harms women. Joel Brind, PhD, a professor of biology and endocrinology at the City University of New York, provided us with the latest statistics and information on the multitudes of studies linking induced abortion to a higher incidence of breast cancer among women.
After these presentations, several women who had undergone abortions gave compelling impact statements, describing the pain and damage they suffered afterwards and how much they regretted that their abortions had taken the lives of their babies.
In contrast to Endeavour Forum's custom of disseminating evidence-backed data on the adverse impacts of abortion, the powerful and well-funded pro-abortion lobby this year produced nothing but lies and propaganda. Down two of the main hallways in the UN building were billboards alleging that thousands of women die each year from illegal and unsafe abortions.
The lobby's proposed "solution"? To make abortion legal and freely available across the entire world and to kill as many babies as possible! This is despite all that we know about abortion's horrific aftermath and complications for women, including elevated risks of breast cancer, pre-term births, sterility and long-term mental-health issues. Making abortion legal does not make it "safe" — either for the mother or for her baby, who is killed.
A landmark study by a young Oxford medical graduate and bioethicist, Dr Calum Miller, has decisively debunked pro-abortion propaganda. In an open-source peer-reviewed journal article, which deserves the widest possible circulation, he writes:
"It is commonly claimed that thousands of women die every year from unsafe abortion in Malawi. This commentary critically assesses those claims, demonstrating that these estimates are not supported by the evidence. On the contrary, the latest evidence — itself from 15 to 20 years ago — suggests that 6–7% of maternal deaths in Malawi are attributable to induced and spontaneous abortion combined, totalling approximately 70–150 deaths per year."
Dr Miller then provides evidence suggesting that "a substantial proportion of these are attributable to spontaneous abortion". He concludes: "To reduce maternal mortality by large margins, emergency obstetric care should be prioritised, which will also save women from complications of induced and spontaneous abortion." (International. Journal of Environmental. Research and Public Health, 18(19), October 2021.)
This year, at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, we prayed that God would open doors for us to meet with many people from across the world.
Despite our team's small number, we had considerable success at the UN in holding productive one-on-one meetings on the right to life with ambassadors and other high-ranking delegates to the UN from various countries, as well as with representatives of various non-government organisations (NGOs).
The time went quickly as we established new relationships and sowed the seeds for pro-life countries to help Endeavour Forum host another side-event at next year's UN Commission on the Status of Women.
Our first meeting was with the South Pacific island-nation of Samoa's Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN. She listened intently to our presentation, and expressed great interest in our objectives. She suggested we ask governments to financially help more single mothers to choose life for their unborn children. She promised to recommend to her boss, the Permanent Representative of Samoa to the UN, that their country should co-sponsor a UN side-event with Endeavour Forum in 2025 as it previously did in 2019.
Other representatives we met, and who supported our cause, were Malawi's First Secretary to the UN in New York, who is also a medical doctor; Sri Lanka's ambassador to the UN; Burkina Faso's ambassador to the UN; and the South Pacific island-state of Nauru's First Secretary to the UN. I intend to draw up a concept memorandum to forward to representatives of those nations which may be willing to be part of a pro-life coalition at the 2025 UN Commission on the Status of Women. This will make history.
Later this year, we may head to the UN's Geneva office to attend sessions devoted to the subject of human rights. We will seek to convince those attending of the injustice of denying babies in the womb their first and most fundamental human right — the right to life.
To God be the glory!
Denise Mountenay is chief administrative officer for Endeavour Forum, Inc., an NGO in special consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
She is also a pro-life speaker, author, award-winning documentary producer and the founder/president of Together for Life Ministries (www.TogetherForLife.net), a Christian outreach to women suffering post-abortion grief.