NEW YORK, August 20, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A major new study just released by the New York-based International Organizations Research Group (IORG) reports in great detail the gradual change of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) from a child survival agency to one that promotes aspects of radical feminism. Produced by the International Organization Research Group, an arm of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), the study is entitled “UNICEF, Women or Children First?”
The paper establishes that UNICEF has endorsed, even helped to write, numerous documents that call for increased access to abortion, as well as for the legalization of abortion. It was also discovered that UNICEF has funded programs that may have included abortion services. UNICEF funded a program run by the Population Council, the group that holds the US patent for the abortion pill RU-486. In 1997 the UN released a handbook for emergency workers in refugee situations that urges the use of abortion-causing “emergency contraception” and also the use of a portable device called the manual vacuum aspirator that can be used for performing abortions in refugee tents.
UNICEF is also a financial supporter of a South African non-governmental organization, loveLife (sic) that actively promotes abortion to its mostly underage audience. The loveLife website directs its teenage audience to the abortion provider Marie Stopes International and goes on to say that no one, including parents, can stop a teenager from getting an abortion. LoveLife also encourages experimental sexual practices including homosexuality.
The report recounts how UNICEF abandoned its traditional approach to sexual education, training in abstinence and fidelity, and replaced it with graphic sexual education programs coupled with condom distribution. It is now official UNICEF policy to “Promote and expand access to sexual and reproductive health services, including access to condoms.” At a June, 2003 meeting, a high-ranking UNICEF official even called for UNICEF “to make condoms available and accessible for everybody, everywhere and at all times. Abstinence is simply not a realistic option for most young people in the world today.”
C-FAM has called for an international campaign of citizens and political leaders to bring UNICEF back to its main mission, which is child survival. “UNICEF has been too important to lose to this radical ideology,” said C-FAM Vice-President Douglas A. Sylva, who is also author of the new report. “UNICEF has a reputation to protect and lots of employees who want it to return to its original mission. We have heard from many of them.
See LifeSite's UNICEF page and our past reporting on many of these same developments within UNICEF over the past several years: https://www.lifesitenews.com/waronfamily/unicef/