SEARCH C-FAM
Friday Fax UN Blog
Facebook 
Twitter
9/8/2010 02:44 PM
EU Commissioner Reding genuflects to the LGBT lobby
9/8/2010 06:23 AM
Antidote to World Youth Conference
9/7/2010 09:04 PM
Billionaire buys 'Civil Society'
9/7/2010 01:36 PM
C-FAM on South African TV: World Youth Conference in Mexico
9/7/2010 00:53 PM
Volume 2, Number 19
March 5, 1999
UN Commission Convenes to Advance International Abortion Right
(NEW YORK - C-FAM) The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) convened its 43rd session at UN headquarters in New York this week. Forty-five nations formally sit on the commission, although well over 100 Member States are participating in what is considered a follow-up body to the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995). The Beijing Women's Conference was one of the most controversial UN meetings of the past several years.
In Beijing, radical feminist forces lobbied to realize their vision of women's rights, including the right of minor girls to have access to family planning programs that include contraceptives and abortion. The CSW meets each year to advance the original Beijing Platform for Action, and to measure the international progress in implementing it.
The first week of UN commissions are taken up with formal speeches from Member States and UN bureaucrats. On Wednesday afternoon, in front of a packed house, Dr. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the UN Population Fund, called for "emergency contraception" for girls. "Emergency contraception" refers to drugs like RU-486 that usually have an abortifacient effect, preventing the implantation of fertilized eggs.
The CSW will produce a document that will be passed along to the UN General Assembly. A close look at a preparatory document produced by a series of "expert group meetings," called "Thematic issues before the Commission on the Status of Women; Report of the Secretary-General," shows how far some want to take the UN and the world.
The document claims that legislative inattention to women's reproductive health is part of a "systematic discrimination against women." The document goes on to say that governments should address the reality and consequences of "unsafe abortion." "Unsafe abortion" is another UN buzz-word that feminists use to call for abortion-on-demand. Moreover, it is their repeated wish that abortion be made a human right that is guaranteed by governments and enforced by the UN and other international bodies.
The report calls for an "integration of family planning into a comprehensive package of reproductive health services" that includes the reproductive health needs of adolescents. This is particularly worrisome since the UN defines adolescents as including those as young as 10 years old. UN population controllers are very nervous about the current cohort of adolescents in the world, which is the largest in history.
One of the most troubling aspects of the report is that it calls for governments to "ensure that women are not deprived of their right to health services on the basis of conscience clauses cited by health providers." Pro-life doctors around the world use conscience clauses to avoid performing abortions in public facilities. It appears that radical feminists want to criminalize these protective clauses.
The "Women and Health" portion of the draft document, which included "reproductive rights" was released late yesterday. Member States will begin debating it this afternoon.
