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Email: "UN Conference on Global Health in Melbourne Dubbed “Relatively Wholesome Affair”"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Hilary WhiteMELBOURNE, September 3, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A UN conference hosted in Melbourne has received an unusually positive review from a prominent local pro-life advocate, who said the event was atypical for its lack of hostility to the unborn and the traditional family. The United Nations Department of Public Information’s 63rd NGO conference in Melbourne, ponderously titled, “Advance Global Health and Achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” was “a comparatively wholesome affair with little of the undercurrent warfare of other feminist-dominated conferences,” said Babette Francis. Francis, National and Overseas Co-ordinator of the life and family advocacy group Endeavour Forum and a veteran lobbyist at the UN, told LSN that the conference “concluded on a happy note for pro-lifers” with its “relatively non-controversial” final declaration. The declaration omits the UN’s nearly ubiquitous “gender agenda” and contained no mention of “sexual or reproductive rights” due to the Endeavour Forum delegates’ interventions. Francis said, “The nearest the feminists got to their wish list was a recommendation for ‘The provision of equitable and effective health services for all people and communities, including the provision of effective health information programs’.”Moreover, unlike most UN international conferences that feature the usual suspects of professional feminist and pro-abortion lobbyists, the Melbourne conference “appeared to be genuinely grass-roots affair.” Speakers included Sakena Yacoobi from Afghanistan, who hid secret schools for girls from the Taliban, and Catherine Hamlin, an Australian obstetrician who works at a hospital that provides free fistula repair surgery to poor women suffering from childbirth injuries in Ethiopia.Francis said, however, that the “usual suspects” were in attendance, including International Planned Parenthood Federation, the United Nations Population Fund and the condom-pushing UNAIDS. Jo Wainer, widow of  the late abortionist Dr. Bertram Wainer, presented an audio-visual program titled, “Human beings are a plague.” But the Endeavour Forum intervened with the UN Secretariat, saying that such negativity is “depressing and discouraging for all the cheerful youth delegates.”Apart from these “sour notes,” she said, the representatives of about 350 NGOs and 1,600 conference participants from over 70 countries, were mostly from groups that are working on “useful projects in the Asia-Pacific  region” and elsewhere. At one point in the conference, Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the world’s largest abortionist groups, objected to the Endeavour Forum’s display table that sported a poster bearing the caption “Vote for Life,” and demanded unsuccessfully that it be taken down.  “MSI were probably even more annoyed by our posters of babies at various stages of gestation, and the DVD we had playing continuously on the link between abortion and breast cancer,” Francis said. http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/un-conference-on-global-health-in-melbourne-dubbed-relatively-wholesome-aff/

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