NEW YORK, March 31, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The just-concluded two-week UN Conference on the Status of Women, or CSW60, has issued a final document containing pro-abortion, pro-contraception and pro-sex education language that will be used to pressure developing countries into accepting contraception and pushing for legal abortion in return for international aid, warn pro-life advocates at the UN.
And that’s despite eleventh-hour efforts by pro-life national delegations to “sink” the contentious language during intense negotiations that went into the early morning hours of March 24, before adjourning briefly and continuing another 12 hours until the Agreed Conclusions were at last adopted at 11 p.m. on Holy Thursday, Nadja Wolfe of the World Youth Alliance told LifeSiteNews in a telephone interview. (See full report embedded below.)
“At a certain point, it’s exhaustion” that determines the outcome of such marathon negotiating sessions, she noted.
The document’s paragraph on health specifically “contains language aimed at increasing access to contraception and abortion and teaching children inappropriate so-called comprehensive sexuality education,” noted Patrick Buckley of the UK-based Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).
And while such documents are not legally binding, they “matter,” because they “can drive funding efforts,” noted Wolfe.
“So when the US, or Canada, or UK, or France is looking at, ‘Here’s our development aid,’ they can point to these Agreed Conclusions and say, ‘Well, you agreed that this was something that was important’,” she said.
Pro-life “countries can stand up to it,” she said, but delegates from such nations have told her, “We’re under a lot of pressure.”
Buckley also stressed that the Agreed Conclusions “will be used to pressurize member states to follow the agenda.”
And while Western countries pushing an abortion agenda “can’t really do things that are illegal,” Wolfe said, “they can certainly promote things.”
Moreover, their intentions are revealed by the organizations they choose to partner with, she said. “For example, USAID will often partner with International Planned Parenthood Federation.”
“Ostensibly, Planned Parenthood abides by the rules,” but “in a practical sense” there is great cause for concern as to just what IPPF is doing on the ground “on things like contraception” and distributing these “to children.”
Document built on previous “bad ideas”
The CSW is an annual event at the UN, and this was the second CSW for Wolfe, who has a law degree from the Virginia-based William and Mary Law School and completed a year-long fellowship at WYA’s New York headquarters before becoming WYA’s director of advocacy in September 2015.
WYA represents about 120,000 young people, and has five satellite offices around the world as well as its New York center.
The Agreed Conclusions have some positive elements, calling for access to “skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetrical care, that’s great stuff,” Wolfe noted.
The contentious paragraph on health, she told LifeSiteNews, “is almost entirely verbatim from two prior sources, which shows you the importance of getting it right from the beginning.”
“Once something’s agreed language, then they say, ‘Well, you agreed to it. Why do you object to it now?’” noted Wolfe. “It’s not legally binding, but it has an attitude almost like precedents in courts.”
“The problem is, we shouldn’t have agreed then.”
A loss at the CSW in 2014 “provided the basis for all the bad ideas this year,” she pointed out. That included a reference to policies and legal frameworks to “make universally accessible and available quality comprehensive sexual and reproductive health-care services” including “modern methods of contraception.”
That latter is “clearly commodities based,” Wolfe said. “That’s not necessarily acceptable in all cultures or all religious traditions.”
She also noted that Paragraph 96 of the Beijing Platform of Action of 1995, the second source, “has this very bizarre language at the end” which was repeated in the CSW60 document: “…include the right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free from coercion, discrimination and violence decide freely…”
“We’d prefer something like in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women” of 1979, Wolfe said, “which would be ‘…freely and responsibly decide the spacing of their own children.’ That’s much more respectful.”
Three options to fight anti-life language
The Agreed Conclusions call for protection and promotion of women’s “sexual and reproductive health, and reproductive rights” in “accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development” (ICDP) from the Cairo conference of 1994.
“There’s a restriction in ICDP, which recognizes essentially that abortion is not a human right,” Wolfe said. “And it recognizes that, by recognizing that it is a matter for national law, so if a country can prohibit it entirely then a right to that can’t be a human right.”
But “every five, ten, fifteen, 20 years, they’ll review these original documents,” she told LifeSiteNews. “And often in those things, they’ll go beyond what’s acceptable, so when they then affirm the outcome documents of their review conferences, we’re looking at things that… may be promoting abortion, so that makes us uncomfortable.”
WYA, as an NGO, or non-governmental organization, was not allowed into the negotiations, Wolfe said, but could lobby and communicate with delegates, who have three options for dealing with the objectionable language in the draft document.
“You can negotiate it out, you can call a vote and sink it that way,” she said, and the “third option once it’s adopted you can make statements in response to that.”
In this case, negotiations came down to “two alternatives,” one a compromise, the other very good, she explained, “but what happened the other side got together and said, ‘We’re not going to give this option.’ ”
“If we had called a vote, we usually win a vote, but nobody called a vote,” Wolfe said, adding that only countries with a representative on the Commission for the Status of Women have a vote, although countries who don’t have a CSW representative take part in negotiations.
Both Wolfe and SPUC’s Buckley commended the courage of pro-life delegates.
“We’re very grateful that countries that are on our side on these issues did make statements against abortion,” Wolfe said.
Read the commission's full report here: