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Volume 11, Number 27
June 19, 2008
UN Agencies Use Stealth Strategy to Gain New UN Goal on Reproductive Health
ITALIAN version
(NEW YORK – C-FAM) The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and other United Nations (UN) agencies and officials over the last several months have been boasting of a “new target” of “universal access to reproductive health by 2015” under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted with much fanfare eight years ago.
Given that the MDGs were developed and passed by a meeting of heads of state after months of negotiations, a new target would have to have been passed by explicit agreement of the General Assembly. UNFPA claims that there is a new target based on a single sentence buried in Annex II on page 73 of a 76 page Secretary General's Report (A/62/1) which was adopted by the General Assembly last year.
More than 150 heads of state, the largest gathering of its sort in history, negotiated the MDGs in 2000. Their agreement consisted of eight broad, largely non-controversial goals such as eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, and reducing child mortality. None of the MDGs makes any mention of “reproductive health” and neither does the Millennium Declaration upon which they are based.
The reason UNFPA and other groups are eager to adopt a new MDG on "reproductive health" is that the term is then used to promote abortion, even though the General Assembly has never agreed to such a definition.
In the lead up to the five year review of the MDGs three years ago, pro-abortion advocates, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation and UNFPA, launched aggressive campaigns to get governments to agree to a new goal on “reproductive health.” Their efforts were defeated.
The 2005 meeting of national leaders decided against issuing new MDGs and instead issued a political declaration that did endorse “reproductive health,” but it is considered a non-binding, aspirational document that has no force in international law. Since those failed attempts to create a new and separate MDG on “reproductive health,” abortion proponents have tried to attach “reproductive health” to the existing MDGs.
The United States (US) consistently asserts that a target on “reproductive health” has never been agreed to by member states. At the board meeting of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) earlier this month, the US delegation took issue with the latest UNICEF report which includes a reference to a “reproductive health” target under the MDGs.
US Representative to UNICEF Bill Brisben stated that while the US is committed to achieving the core MDGs as agreed to in the Millennium Declaration and reaffirmed in the 2005 Outcome Document of the World Summit, the US “does not support the addition of new goals, targets, or indicators to the internationally-agreed Millennium Development Goals,” and that “neither we nor other UN Member States have agreed to the creation by the UN Secretariat of a new MDG target on reproductive health.”
