Published: 3/11/10 02:11 PM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
US Releases Human Rights Country Reports
The much anticipated report "2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" was just released by the US Department of State.
In her remarks while launching the report, Secretary of State Clinton highlighted U.S. participation in the Universal Periodic Review and the UN Human Rights Council. She announced that State will deliver its first report this fall, highlighting the fact that the report card on American observance of human rights is "based on the input of citizens and NGOs."
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Filed Under : Human rights |
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Published: 3/11/10 12:25 PM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Latest UNFPA assault on girls
A new document from the UN Populatiom Fund (UNFPA) gives us a window into the strategy for garnering major development funds. UNFPA links its funding of condom and abortion promotion (such as International Planned Parenthood Federation which receives most of its income through these services in various regions) to "mandates" in UN documents and targets to target a new generation of consumers.
UNFPA bases its campaign on a non-binding 2009 Commission for Population Development (CPD) resolution, and on MDG 5 target b. The target was never accepted by UN member states in open debate and the last time it was debated in 2005, it was rejected. Arguably this is flimsy basis for a UN campaign, especially a controversial one.
The means is "evidence-based advocacy with national governments to increase their investment" - getting governments to declare UNFPA services a core part of health systems. Since UNFPA distributes funds to developing countries, it is hard not to see in this strategy a form of implicit coercion or at least pressure. After all, if nations were clamoring for UNFPA's agenda, there would be no need for UNFPA to "advocate" or use UN documents as a tool.
The goal, and what's so troubling about the document, is to target children. Like many global corporations, UNFPA seeks to gain market share among adolescents.
Rather than promoting universal education for girls, UNFPA says they are indifferent to whether they get new users in or out of the classroom. They seek to "Ensure that programmes meet the needs of young people, a large and diverse population group, by ensuring access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education, for both in-school and out-of-school youth; providing youth friendly services."
Rather than seek to improve basic health systems and fight top killers of women, they instead seek to promote abortion (often cloaked in the term "sexual and reproductive health services") at the very center of health systems. They argue that: "Family planning and sexual and reproductive health services must be acknowledged and positioned as core components of basic health services."
Rather than supporting local traditions and cultures, UNFPA seeks to enforce their agenda by using legal means: "Financial, legal, and other barriers to access, especially for disadvantaged groups and individuals, should be identified and eliminated."
In stark contrast, the UN Population Division just released its latest fertility chart showing how fertility is already plummeting across the globe. The division also recently released a report showing the dire consequences for developing nations, especially women.
The question is whether target nations will offer up their own youth to help fulfill UNFPAs ill-fated agenda.
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Filed Under : Abortion, Demography, Population Control, UN Agencies |
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Published: 3/10/10 06:34 PM - By Samantha Singson
UN Fertility Report Shows Dangerous "Birth Dearth" for Developed Countries
The UN Population Division has just released its latest World Fertility Chart. It is not a surprise that across the globe, women today are having fewer children than women in the 1970s, but the latest statistics are showing alarming figures for the developed countries.
Bearing in mind that replacement level fertility is 2.1 children to offset mortality, the latest statistics from the Population Division show that Europe, Northern America and even Eastern Asia fall below that mark.
"Northern America" - which includes Canada, the United States, Bermuda and Greenland are coming in just under replacement level at 2.0 children per woman. Europe as a whole is averaging a 1.5 fertility rate, with Eastern Europe at only 1.3 children per woman. The statistics show that low birthrates are not exclusive to the Western world. In Eastern Asia - including China, Japan, North and South Korea are also experience a "bearth dearth" with total fertility levels at only 1.7 children per woman.
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Filed Under : Demography, Population Control, UN Agencies |
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Published: 3/10/10 04:31 PM - By Hannah Russo
Spain: One Million March for Life
This week 1 million Spaniards marched as one protesting the countries new law on abortion. The new law allows women that are 16 years and older to obtain an abortion up until the 14th week of pregnancy.
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Filed Under : Abortion |
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Published: 3/10/10 03:35 PM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Fight Erupts for UN New Human Rights Job
Details of who is in the running for the new UN human rights job, which will serve as liaison between UN headquarters and UNHCHR in Geneva, can be found in a recent Foreign Policy article. According to FP, a full-fledged lobbying fight has broken out:
The competition pits Irene Khan of Bangladesh, who stepped down in December as secretary general of Amnesty International, against Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's U.N. ambassador, and David Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes. Joanna Weschler, a Polish pro-democracy activist in the 1980s who served as former U.N. representative for Human Rights Watch, is also in the running.
Human rights organizations and governments are closely monitoring the selection process to see whether Ban will select a strong rights advocate for the post or chose a discreet diplomatic operator who can prevent the post from generating controversy in an organization that includes many countries with poor rights records. Ban has gained a reputation as a cautious diplomat who is averse to publicly confronting countries that abuse their citizens, preferring to pursue a policy of quiet diplomacy to convince them to mend their ways. Some officials following the matter said Ban's diplomatic temperament makes it unlikely that he would choose to bring an outspoken rights advocate like Khan into his inner circle in New York, particularly since she has clashed with important member states.
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Filed Under : Human rights |
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Published: 3/10/10 03:14 PM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
UN Remembers its Dead
Today the UN held a memorial service for those who died in Haiti eight weeks ago. According to the New York Times it was the heaviest toll the UN had taken in one day, and it took a full 15 minutes to read the 101 names.
Among them was Jan Hausotter, a friend of my husband and mine from our days at the Fletcher School. Jan was intense, sincere, and unusually positive despite the many difficulties of working within a global bureaucracy.
Like many of our friends from Fletcher, he believed he could make the world a little bit better for other people who did not have the advantages he had growing up in a Western democracy. May God reward him and the other UN diplomats who paid the ultimate price trying to make that difference in the world.
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Filed Under : UN Agencies |
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Published: 3/8/10 11:56 AM - By Samantha Singson
Planned Parenthood Releases New Glossary
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has just released a new glossary of terms. According to IPPF, "it is essential to use the language of sexual and reproductive health carefully and conscientiously in the face of growing attacks from conservative quarters." IPPF accuses conservatives of employing "a strategy of manipulating and misusing the language of modern sexual and reproductive health services and rights, in order to mislead."
IPPF touts its efforts to use language that is "unambigious" and "unequivocal." The glossary includes but is not limited to medical definitions and a listing of various medical conditions. For example, IPPF's definition of "gender" refers to "the biological, legal, economic, social and cultural attributes and opportunities associated with male and female."
IPPF's entry on "human life" is similarly novel. IPPF states that:
"Spermatozoa and ova are living entities, but before fertilization there is no ‘new’ human life. Taking conception (fertilization) as the beginning of a ‘new’ life is controversial because the fertilized egg may be lost through resorption/disappearance, non-implantation resulting in spontaneous miscarriage, ectopic or molar pregnancy. Most laws define the beginning of life as occurring at birth."
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Published: 3/8/10 11:11 AM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
UNDP report shows massive killings of baby girls
Today the UN Development Program released a report on women in Asia that emphasizes sex selective killings of baby girls. Some 96 million girls are "missing" due to the enduring and pervasive nature of the problem. The Economist ran an excellent story covering the report this week, and the Wall Street Journal covered it as well.
It is encouraging that most news stories report the hideously common problem of sex selective abortion as the cause of the sex imbalance and not just a general preference for sons.
As I a queried in a previous blog: will any of this overwhelming data influence the Commission on the Status of Women, now convened at UN headquarters, to condemn sex selective abortion?
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Filed Under : Abortion, Demography, UN Agencies |
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Published: 3/5/10 01:17 PM - By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
IPPF: "Abstinence, but only with condoms."
Yesterday at an event organized by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) at the UN, a fresh faced law student from Ave Maria University stood up and asked simply if IPPF included abstinence education it its "comprehensive sexual education" programs in Latin America. Knocked off guard, the representative from the pro-abortion group Ipas literally wriggled then regrouped and told her: "Abstinence is not 100% effective for preventing pregnancy, so we would only recommend abstinence with condoms."
Giggles all around.
Next a woman identifying herself as a lesbian activist stood up to say that the movement needs to be honest in its aims. "Our opponents say that sexual education will destroy the moral fiber of society. They are right. Sexual education destroys the moral of virginity, they say. I say, 'good riddance.'" Applause from the panel and half the audience.
The panel, called "Young Women and Abortion," was typical of the NGO events taking place at UN headquarters this week at the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
The representative from the world's leading purveyor of sexual education for children, SEICUS, explained matter-of-factly that sexual rights are international human rights just like the right to life and free speech.
Sexual rights are grounded, she said, in three things: two general comments from treaty monitoring bodies (one from the committee that monitors the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and one from the committee monitoring the Convention on the Rights of the Child), and technical guidance contained in the Beijing Platform for Action). Never mind that none of these are binding on nations. Never mind that general comments are only the interpretations of a few UN bureaucrats. In fact, when another law student in the audience pointed this out, the SEICUS rep successfully ducked citing lack of time.
The SEICUS representative told what she called a heart-breaking story about a 16 year old girl named Fatima from Morocco who said, "I didn't know you could get pregnant doing that." I queried, "Is there any law forbidding parents from telling their children about how babies are made? Why the need for a new human right?" An agitated member of the audience informed the IPPF expert that she might want to enlighten me about the fact that not all parents will talk to their children about these issues. The government must step in to give them their rights!
Then, in what is a sad but perennial phenomenon at CSW, two earnest women from developing countries stood up in turn to support the need for sexual education but only with local collaboration. Their remarks showed how attempts at compromise with ideological purity fall flat. "You cannot just go in and talk to girls about this stuff without first going through the parents," one said. And another: "We have culture and tradition, aside from religion, that should be used when dealing with this issue." They seemed to want the content but not the structure.
But the structure of sexual rights IS the content. Circumventing the parents is the only way to ensure that children will be indoctrinated with the purest form of the Western-style message: sex for adolescents whenever and with whomever, without consequence.
When the panel enthusiastically said -- yes, yes! -- using religious institutions is the latest and best initiative they are pursuing, they did not in any way intimate that they would allow the churches any control over the message.
The pro-life conservative law students and the radical leftist, however, had no such crossed communications. They were in perfect concert about what what was really going on: supporting sexual rights as human rights and supporting traditional faith and family are mutually exclusive. Compromises with sexual rights orthodoxy leads only to silliness such as "Abstinence, but only with condoms."
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Filed Under : Abortion, Family, Human rights, IPPF, NGOs, UN Commissions |
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Published: 3/5/10 11:39 AM - By Hannah Russo
Extra-Small Condoms for Kids
The Swiss government sponsored a study revealing that 12-14 year old boys do not use proper protection when having sex.
Naturally the next step would be to do exactly what they did – develop a smaller condom.
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