BALI, December 6, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – A youth project of the United Nations has recommended nations should “never prevent access” to receiving “safe and legal abortion” – a criterion that would strike down all parental consent or notification laws, waiting periods, or age of consent laws, effectively guaranteeing abortion as a right to children as young as 12.
The recommendations also ask nations to teach sex education, including LGBT practices, and to legalize same-sex marriage in the name of young people’s sexual “rights.”
The recommendations come from the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Global Youth Forum, an initiative of UNFPA. This week ICPD held a plenary session on “Families, youth-rights and well-being (including sexuality).”
The report states that “religious barriers…should never prevent access to family planning, safe and legal abortion,” because “young people have autonomy over their own bodies, pleasures, and desires.”
The contention echoes the 2012 report of its parent organization, the UN Population Fund. That document, which declared birth control a “human right,” states that “‘duty-bearers’ (governments and others)” must assure that all forms of contraception – including sterilization and abortion-inducing ‘emergency contraception’ – are viewed as acceptable. “UNFPA commits in particular to…supporting both men and women to transform gender attitudes and cultural [and religious] barriers that impede access to and use of family planning,” it stated.
The ICPD Global Youth Forum recommended that “Governments should decriminalize abortion and create and implement policies and programs that ensure that young women have access to safe and legal abortion, pre- and post-abortion services, without mandatory waiting periods, requirements for parental and spousal notification and/or consent, or age of consent.”
Governments should also rescind all age of consent laws for sexual and reproductive health services, as they “infringe on the sexual and reproductive…rights of adolescents and youth.”
Sex education should be tailored to include “every young person, including LGBTQI young people.”
World leaders must also eradicate “bullying in the home, school, workplace, and community.”
“Governments must repeal…laws that limit same-sex marriage,” the recommendations state, listing such laws alongside “harmful practices such as early forced marriage, rape, sexual and gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and all other forms of violence against adolescent girls and young women.”
“The concept of family is constantly evolving, and governments must…embrace every form of family,” the report states. “Governments should ensure the right of everyone to form a family, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
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Although the document comes from a plenary session that boasts of worldwide involvement, UN watchers note that the discussion was highly restricted and participation made unduly complicated.
The session was scheduled to take place in Bali at 3:35 p.m. EST on Wednesday but commenced almost nine hours later, in the middle of the night.
The French and Malay speakers were not translated for the virtual delegates around the world, although they were expected to give their feedback.
The paper acting as the basis of the meeting was presented only in Malay.
“By holding the conference in a remote location, misrepresenting the time of the sessions, and ensuring that a key part of the most controversial session is in a tongue which is not even among the official UN languages, the agencies hosting the event are able to present a veneer of inclusivity on what is obviously a tightly stage-managed affair,” Rebecca Oas of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute wrote. “When international treaty bodies come around to demolish what is dearest to us – the principle that all humans, including the unborn, have dignity and rights that deserve protection – they will undoubtedly cite the outcomes of this conference and others like it and ask us why we didn’t let our voices be heard at the proper time and place.”