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LONDON, March 5, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Speaking at a recent Nordic meeting on ‘Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights’, Dr Steven Sinding, the Director-General of International Planned Parenthood Federation, called the current state of affairs “perhaps the most challenging time since the modern ‘population movement’ began in the 1960s with respect to reproductive health and rights.”

In the important speech, the leader of the world’s leading abortion advocacy organization outlined a strategy centering on a “rights-based” approach targeting the young. Interestingly, this is similar to the approach that the homosexual activist movement, which IPPF also supports, adopted in 1986 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision said homosexuality is not equal in law to heterosexuality.  Sinding notes that the funding for his population control behemoth is in danger with the demise of the fear of the over population crisis.  “The demographic fear that drove funding from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s is to all extents and purposes gone,” said Sinding.

He said his movement is now sustained by the Cairo Programme of Action which calls for “universal access to reproductive health information and services.”  However, he laments that Cairo’s incentive for IPPF support is not nearly as compelling as the fear-driven “population crisis”.  Sinding whines that the Cairo Programme is not fully endorsed in the U.N.‘s Millenium Development Goals (MDG) and that AIDS – and thus the massive funding generated from it – is not seen as directly “a sexual and reproductive health and rights issue” which would bring money to IPPF.  “One cannot ignore the assault on the Cairo Programme of Action mounted by the United States of America and its allies in the Vatican and a small handful of other countries with fundamentalist governments,” says Sinding.  He cites this “conservative backlash” as contributing to the organization’s hard times.

In his address Sinding sets out strategic goals including inextricably linking Cairo to the MDG and to the health care for AIDS patients.  Thus Cairo’s abortion rights-contraception agenda must be tied to the MDG poverty alleviation and to AIDS prevention.  Sinding encouraged the Nordic political leaders present at the meeting to confront his enemy number one – the United States.  “Engage the US and other critics of the Programme of Action head on. It is essential to show the absurdity of their ‘abstinence only’ and anti-condom crusades,” said Sinding.

Concluding, Sinding said, “Nordic leadership was essential to the invention and promotion of the rights-based approach and it is as crucial as ever at this moment of peril posed by the United States.”  See the full speech by Sinding at:  https://ippfnet.ippf.org/pub/IPPF_News/News_Details.asp?ID=2645

See the Interim’s February 2003 expose on Planned Parenthood https://www.lifesitenews.com/interim/2003/feb/13thewisdom.html https://www.lifesitenews.com/interim/2003/feb/12plannedparenthood.html   See also IPPF SAYS UN CHILD RIGHTS TREATY ENDORSES ABORTION FOR CHILDREN https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/oct/02102906.html   UNITED NATIONS POPULATION FUND AND IPPF CONFIRM MUTUAL GOALS https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/mar/01031303.html