It looks like some UN committees are raising up again in total support of abortion. When the Bush administration had previously decided to withhold money to many U.N. groups these same groups then publicly stated that they were not advocating abortion and they worked to suppress some of their own documents that expressed fervent abortion support. Catholic World News along with C-Fam reports on an interim report in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
The 2004 interim report by the same Task Force on Gender Equality was still more explicit, stating that to achieve this goal, "At a minimum, national public health systems must provide quality family planning, safe abortion, and emergency obstetric services."
The interim report also said that "the Task Force opposes the political ideologies and religious fundamentalisms that have sought to erode women’s reproductive rights guaranteed through numerous international conventions. These forces have persuaded some national governments, including the US, to pursue three strategies: limiting or withdrawing funding from effective programs that support women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy; censoring or distorting information and research on comprehensive health interventions and issues; and reneging on previous international agreements involving sexual and reproductive health and rights. These tactics threaten to choke the progress that has been made in the last ten years to improve women’s reproductive health and may worsen the inferior reproductive health status of poor women around the world."
The Millennium Report has been endorsed by major UN agencies including UNICEF, whose outgoing head Carol Bellamy said, "We could not support it more strongly." The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) specifically referred to the report’s focus on "ensuring universal access to reproductive health" as "critical" to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. [Source]
I truly hopes the Bush administration will go back to not funding these UN commissions. It is sad how UNICEF has changed from helping to feed children to preventing children instead.
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“Quality family planning, safe abortion, and emergency obstetric services.”
Something rings wrong about this statement. I think they care much more about contraception and abortion than they care about obstetrics. Emergency obstetric care as the only maternity care is the reason that the U.S. has a higher infant mortality rate than other developed nations. It is an inadequate standard. If one is going to mandate that the state provide some health care, isn’t it far more important to ensure healthy mothers and babies, than to force public funded contraception and abortion?
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