LONDON, December 22, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – According to a British parliamentary committee on international development, attempts to manipulate the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to promote universal access to “reproductive health” services, including abortion and contraception, have failed.
The Select Committee on International Development issued a report this week from the 2010 Millennium Development Goals Review Summit, praising the British government’s commitment to promoting abortion and contraception overseas; but they said they were “surprised” that the Summit Outcome Document “does not mention population growth at all.”
“We also believe this issue is under-prioritised in the current MDG framework,” said the committee’s report. “The world’s population is growing and it is startling that global development structures do not take account of this increasing squeeze on resources.”
John Smeaton, head of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, credited the abortion lobby’s failure to use the MDG’s for their purposes to years of concerted pro-life activism against the effort.
“It’s another welcome reminder that pro-life lobbying works,” Smeaton said. “We’re not successful every time as is so tragically obvious here in Britain, rightly described as the ‘geopolitical centre of the culture of death’. However, well-informed, courteous, disciplined lobbying works.”
MDG Goal 5 concerns maternal health, with a target set “to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015.” SPUC and other international pro-life groups have fought to stop this goal being “hijacked” to introduce global legalized abortion ever since the MDGs were adopted by all 192 UN member states at the 2000 World Summit.
However, the failure of the abortion movement has not been due to any lack of interest on the part of the British government. “Sexual and reproductive health” has been a major priority of the UK’s new coalition government, as it was for the Blair/Brown Labour governments.
The Select Committee praised the UK Secretary of State’s “commitment to put reproductive health at the centre” of the programs run by the Department for International Development (DFID), “and to extend contraception to 10 million couples.”
“As 2015 draws closer, we recommend that DFID advocate strongly that the post-2015 framework give sufficient attention to the issue of population growth so that future targets take account of the need to address the world’s increasing number of people,” the committee report said.