(LifeSiteNews) — The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) could be sending abortifacient drugs to Ukraine as part of “post-rape kits.”
“We stand with the brave work of @UNFPA to deliver contraception and birthing, feminine hygiene & post-rape kits,” Planned Parenthood Global tweeted on March 11.
“UNFPA is scaling up and has supplies in Poland ready to come into Ukraine once reliable humanitarian corridors are running,” VOA News reported. “[UNFPA’s Ukraine representative] said supplies include birthing kits, post-rape treatment kits, contraception and feminine hygiene kits.”
Health care is a human right. Targeting health care facilities, including those serving pregnant women, is unacceptable.
We stand with the brave work of @UNFPA to deliver contraception and birthing, feminine hygiene & post-rape kits. #NotATarget https://t.co/gk0UNysbep
— Planned Parenthood Global (@ppglobe) March 11, 2022
Some of the supplies in the “reproductive health kits” are intended to help with the safe delivery of babies and post-partum care in situations where medical care is not otherwise available. But other parts of these kits do include drugs that can prevent implantation, as well as abortifacient birth control.
Included in the kits, according to a 2019 guide from the UNFPA, are 55 tablets of levonorgestrel — a chemical compound used to prevent pregnancy or implantation.
The UNFPA has been in Ukraine since 1997. “In addition to providing technical and programme advisory services to neighbouring Member States that are receiving refugees, the agency is working to bring reproductive health equipment and supplies and mobile health teams providing sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence services to Ukraine,” it stated in a March 11 article.
Some of this work includes helping women deliver babies, but other work does appear to include handing out abortifacient drugs. The kits also include instruments and drugs for “lifesaving post-abortion care in health centres and hospitals.”
The Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) said UNFPA began including abortions as part of its efforts.
“Sadly this is not surprising; UNFPA has been promoting what’s called the Minimum Initial Service Package, or MISP, for use in humanitarian settings for years,” C-FAM’s Director of Research Rebecca Oas told LifeSiteNews on Friday. “However, a few years ago so-called ‘safe abortion’ was added to the MISP, despite the fact that there is neither an international human right nor a humanitarian right to abortion, and many sites of conflict or disaster have laws restricting abortion.”
“Unfortunately, UNFPA and others have been using crisis settings to push the boundaries on abortion. We’ve seen UNFPA partnering with abortion organizations like Ipas to bring abortion to refugees from Myanmar in Bangladesh,” she said. “While UNFPA insists that it doesn’t promote abortion when it’s asking for U.S. funding, the facts say otherwise.”
Students for Life Action criticized the UNFPA as well.
“Humanitarian aid sent into war zones is supposed to be life-affirming with the purpose of helping and healing those caught in the conflict,” Caroline Wharton told LifeSiteNews on Friday. “However, it is a sad reflection of the abortion lobby’s ghoulish priorities when abortifacients are sent into a situation that has enough causalities as it is.”
The UNFPA’s New York-based spokesperson Eddie Wright said he would respond on Friday but did not provide comment by deadline.
The organization has been complicit in supporting China’s pro-abortion, pro-contraception one-child policy. The Trump administration pulled funds from the UNFPA due to its support for abortion. “As long as UNFPA supports or participates in any program of coercive birth limitation, the United States will not fund UNFPA,” a U.S. ambassador said in 2017. President Joe Biden moved quickly to restore funding once he took office in January 2021.