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Donald Trump’s nominee for United States UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 26, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley won confirmation as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by a lopsided vote in the Senate on Tuesday morning, raising hopes that the U.S. will pressure the UN to stop pushing abortion.

During her confirmation hearings, Haley repeatedly stated her pro-life convictions.

Only three senators, including Bernie Sanders, who lost to Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination for president in the U.S. election, voted against Haley.

During Senate committee hearings, several areas of disagreement between Haley and President Donald Trump emerged — most importantly her staunch opposition to Russia’s current expansionist policies — but on life issues they are on the same page.

Trump has already reinstated and strengthened the Mexico City Policy banning foreign aid to organizations promoting abortion, notably Planned Parenthood International.

When Democratic Sens. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Cory Booker of New Jersey pushed Haley for a commitment to so-called “family planning” programs overseas that are used to advance abortion, she replied, “I am strongly pro-life.”

Sen. Shaheen pressed Haley to acknowledge that family planning was different from abortion.

Haley agreed that women should be advised of different family planning methods but repeated her commitment to “pro-life principles.”

But as the pro-life Centre for Family and Human Rights noted in its coverage of the hearings, “Most of the largest foreign family planning organizations also promote abortion … [so] the policy would make them ineligible for federal funds unless they ceased to do so.”

Haley agreed that women should be advised of different methods of family planning but repeated her commitment to “pro-life principles,” according to C-Fam.

Sen. Booker similarly sought Haley’s commitment to maintain the Obama regime’s promotion of the LGBT agenda in developing countries, but all he could extract was Haley’s declaration that she opposed “discrimination of any kind.” Haley did not identify LGBT claims as a human rights issue.

Susan Yoshihara, C-Fam’s senior vice president for research, said, “Nikki Haley has a solid pro-life background, and we are hopeful.”

C-Fam’s Stefano Gennarini outlined the magnitude of the job Haley faces in an article on the organization’s website, noting five policies that she must push at the UN.

The first is to oppose “the further retrenchment of sexual and reproductive health policies,” including the push for abortion to be recognized as a human right.

The second has already been done: to restore the Mexico City Policy.

The third is to “rein in the Human Rights bureaucracy ” and return it to merely an administrative role. The UN’s secretary general and the human rights commission are promoting the LGBT agenda as well as abortions, Gennarini wrote.

The human rights commission, he told LifeSiteNews, is based in Geneva, Switzerland, where it is controlled by staff drawn largely from Northern Europe and is committed to expanding the reach of human rights far beyond what the UN’s member nations want.

Fourth, the UN agencies that help draft and administer treaties have expanded their role to include lawmaking — often in ways destructive to family values. Gennarini notes, “One of their principal goals has been to promote abortion as a right under several pretext including women’s equality, torture, the right to life [and] the rights of the child.”

Finally, the U.S. must reverse former President Obama’s foreign policy of promoting the LGBT agenda around the world. Most glaringly, Gennarini said, Obama’s foreign policy called for “deletion of long-revered language about family as the ‘natural fundamental group unit of society’ in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from any UN resolution.”

Gennarini said the U.S. wields considerable “soft power” at the UN because it provides one-third of the organization’s funding. As well, when new programs are launched, the U.S. has the chance to provide voluntary funding or to attach conditions.

“She is going to have a tough job,” Gennarini told LifeSiteNews, “especially since she is unfamiliar with how the UN bureaucracy operate. But we are confident that Nikki Haley will be able to push back against the global abortion lobby.”

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