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UNICEF's Other Agendas

Popular Children's Aid Agency at Odds With Conservative Religious Groups for Embracing Politically Correct U.N. Viewpoints

By Joe Woodard, Calgary Herald, Saturday, October 26, 2002
(reproduced by LifeSite News with permission of the author)

As Halloween approaches, promising a mob of giggling goblins bearing orange-and-black UNICEF boxes, the debate over supporting the UN Children's Fund is again heating up.

Even before feminist Carol Bellamy's 1994 appointment as director of UNICEF, the aid organization began straying from its original mandate: to help children in underdeveloped countries survive to adulthood. Bellamy is a former Bella Abzug associate and New York state senator, known for her opposition to a 1970s Born Alive bill to protect aborted fetuses that survived the procedure.

Over the past 15 years, particularly under Bellamy's leadership, UNICEF has increasingly pushed controversial sex education among children, population control and abortion programs that risk alienating beneficiaries in developing Christian, Muslim and traditional societies.

This trend was codified in the 1998 declaration in Geneva of a partnership of the Children's Fund, World Health Organization and UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). That partnership -- the Co-ordinating Committee on Health -- aligned UNICEF with UNFPA's major partner agency, International Planned Parenthood, which ranks second only to the the Chinese government in the volume of abortions it provides.

UNICEF's association with sometimes coercive Third World population control -- what conservatives have called "rich, white people preventing the birth of poor, dark babies" -- raises some hackles. "UNICEF is part of the global population control agenda pushing abortion," said Calgarian Mary Doherty, a Catholic volunteer at the Alberta Family Life Centre.

"Diverting even a part of my dollar to killing Third World children and sterilizing their mothers isn't something I want to support, even if most of my dollar goes to good programs."

UNICEF Canada spokesman David Agnew of Toronto is unaware of the Geneva alliance between UNICEF and the UNFPA, but he said, "I don't subscribe to the view that we're involved in population control. We have a long-standing policy on family planning, but we don't provide contraception and we don't provide abortions . . . "There is a lot of disinformation out there." If it is disinformation, there is indeed a lot of it.

Canadian geographer Winifride Prestwich, of Toronto's Havergal College, first detailed UNICEF's gradual embrace of the population control and sexual liberation ideology in her 1996 book, UNICEF: Guilty As Charged. Working entirely from UNICEF and other United Nations records, Prestwich detailed how "UNICEF, unwillingly at first, was carried along by a tide of change." She concluded: "It is not a charity, like Easter Seals or Operation Eyesight, run by people with a personal interest in the cause . . . UNICEF is an international government organization, controlled by an executive board . . . with its own agenda."

Since Prestwich's expose, a dozen mainly Christian watchdog groups have added to the evidence suggesting that, even where UNICEF is not the lead agency in programs undermining religious values and the traditional family, it does support them:

- In 1987, UNICEF officially endorsed "good quality abortion services" at the International Conference on Better Health for Women and Children in Nairobi, Kenya.
- In 1993, UNICEF boosted its quiet contribution to UNFPA's open support for China's "one-child family" policy -- Beijing's program to shrink its population with coerced sterilizations, late-term abortions and sometimes infanticide -- from $2 million to $5 million.
- In 1995, the Catholic Women's League of the Philippines won a court order halting a UNICEF anti-tetanus program because the vaccine had been laced with B-hCG, a hormone that sterilizes and causes miscarriages in its recipients. The Supreme Court of the Philippines found the surreptitious sterilization program had already vaccinated three million women, aged 12 to 45. B-hCG-laced vaccine was also found in at least four other developing countries.
- In its 1997 State of the World's Children report, UNICEF praised China as the most "baby-friendly" nation in the world, solely because of its legislation, despite widely distributed video documentation of "dying rooms" of starving babies in Chinese orphanages and widespread child labour.
- Also in 1997, the Vatican stopped its symbolic UNICEF donation, since the agency refused to provide a detailed accounting of its population control and pro-abortion programs.
- In 2000, UNICEF awarded Ted Turner with its Trick or Treat Partner Award, for his multimillion-dollar support of global population control programs.
- Last year, the Latin America-based international abortion promoter IPAS (http://www.ipas.org) advised potential clients its "manual vacuum aspirators" (for village abortions) are supplied by the UNICEF Warehouse Catalogue. When Christian groups complained to UNICEF, IPAS pulled the reference from its Web page. - UNICEF funded a teen Web site (http://www.lovelife.org.za) based in South Africa, encouraging children to seek abortions, promoting bisexuality ("Why let body parts limit the power of love?") and instructing them in sexual foreplay ("After, you could always share your special tricks with us!").

UNICEF Canada spokesman Agnew denied that UNICEF supports any sort of population control efforts such as China's one-child family program: "What we are doing in China is addressing their huge problem with childhood iodine deficiency -- you know, the iodine we get in salt.

"In Afghanistan, we're rebuilding schools, training teachers and shipping in school supplies. In Africa, we have national immunization days, where we fan out across the countryside and immunize literally hundreds of thousands of kids. We're close to eradicating polio. And we're working hard on child protection issues -- child labourers and child soldiers."

Agnew said he doesn't know why the Vatican still withholds its symbolic endorsement of UNICEF -- "you'd have to ask the Vatican." But, he says, "in the field, UNICEF works closely with quite a lot of faith-based development agencies" on a project-by-project basis.

Last May at the UN Child Summit in New York, Washington Times writer George Archibald confronted Bellamy with a UNICEF sex education manual distributed in Latin America. That manual endorses abortion, homosexuality and sex with inanimate objects and animals, seriously offending the region's majority-Catholic values.

The manual counsels: "Here we should insist that there is no ideal or perfect relationship between two or several people; (just) the one that gives us the most satisfaction."

Bellamy admitted UNICEF had produced the sex manual, but said it had subsequently been withdrawn from circulation. She was then flatly contradicted by the former chief health officers of both Mexico and Nicaragua, Archibald said, charging that UNICEF still distributes the manual through the region

"UNICEF was simply dishonest in denying they were still involved," said Archibald from his office at the Washington Times.

"They were simply dissembling about what they were doing, encouraging children to become sexually active at a very young age despite all the statistical evidence of the health risks that involves."

UNICEF's Agnew knew about the Latin American sex-ed manual, but repeated the official claim that New York withdrew it in the late 1990s, as soon it was discovered what had been put together by the local office. "Let's be fair," he said, stressing that the error was in the past.

Austin Ruse, director of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) in New York, said he believes UNICEF's potential public relations nightmare is worsening.

"We've just got another nasty UNICEF sex-ed manual with graphic illustrations, showing children how to masturbate.

"UNICEF always gives the standard reply, that those things are done by their national offices. But they do nothing to clean up all of it."

Sharon Slater, president of the ecumenical United Families International (http://www.unitedfamilies.org), attended the New York Child's Summit in May. "UNICEF was running the conference and they'd brought children in from the developing countries to act as delegates," Slater said.

"We watched them grooming those kids to support reproductive rights and abortion rights for children as young as 10. At one point, a young African girl, 15, came over to us and asked: 'Why is this whole conference about abortion?' -- she thought she'd come there to deal with issues like vaccination and clean water."

United Families International is partnered with four local aid organizations in Africa and claims increasing success in fighting the AIDS epidemic by teaching abstinence and monogamous marriage.

The only African country in which real progress has been made in stopping AIDS is Uganda, where Slater said, the president and first lady widely broadcast the abstinence message.

Yet, UNICEF and UNFPA have done "untold damage" by pushing so-called "safe sex," she said.

"Planned Parenthood itself says the failure rate for condoms is 25.8 per cent. So by telling the Africans that condoms will protect them, they're helping to kill off the African people."

UNICEF's most vocal critics lament that the organization, founded for the single purpose of aiding the survival of children, is entangled in contentious ideological programs.

"These things all distract UNICEF from engaging in its first, most noble mission, distract it from all the good things it still does," said C-FAM researcher Doug Sylva.

"The director before Bellamy, Jim Grant, tried his best to focus on a few specific things, like oral hydration for kids dying from diarrhea, and in the 1980s, he saved millions of children.

"But UNICEF is in a difficult position. It's not autonomous from the UN and, as the UN Secretariat adopts a radical feminist, anti-population, pro-abortion ideology, UNICEF is tainted.

"Hundreds of thousands of children are still dying of TB or malaria, or because they don't have clean water. And the UN is giving them IUDs." Evangelical Christian Mary Kassian of Edmonton, author of The Feminist Gospel, said supporting a "tainted" agency such as UNICEF -- one that still does a lot of good -- is clearly a matter of personal conscience, "but I chose long ago not to support UNICEF and to support those good causes through other agencies, that aren't tainted."

Christians face such dilemmas every day, Kassian said -- "for example, if I buy a CD by an immoral artist, am I supporting his bad causes?" And since they are matters of personal conscience, she would "never condemn anyone for supporting UNICEF."

Yet, "Christians need to exercise their consciences," she said. "If Christians did that a whole lot more, as a matter of democratic right, then we'd begin to exert pressure on organizations when they begin to drift across that line."

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