The UN was advised by the U.S. government in May 2020 that its humanitarian food aid package to developing countries should not be premised on recipient countries providing abortion services contrary to their culture and religion (see July 2020 REALity). The UN ignored this warning.
The UN Commission on Population and Development (CPN) spent the entire month of June 2020 demanding that its food package, desperately needed in Yemen, Ecuador and other developing countries, because of the COVID-19, should still include the provision for abortion.
The United States, together with some other countries, refused to let this food package go forward under these terms. Instead of compromising on this issue, the CPN decided, instead, to remove the food package altogether from distribution. In effect, the UN officials decided that their entrenched ideology on promoting elective abortion had priority over basic humanitarian needs.
Sadly, the response to the problem of food shortages during the pandemic has, in effect, been sabotaged by the UN’s myopic preoccupation with abortion. In fact, the CPN, which sets the agenda for the UN’s controversial population control agency, called United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), has failed in four out of the past six years to obtain any result from negotiations because several governments have resisted UNFPA’s aggressive pro-abortion agenda. The European Union and Luxembourg are the main culprits their obstinacy on abortion.
UNFPA Initial Service Package (ISP) (food), its COVID-19 response providing a so-called food package, essential for survival in some countries, was to include a box kit with “reproductive health materials”. The kits contain a variety of abortion-related items, such as vacuum extractors and cranioclasts for crushing fetal skulls. This is in blatant violation of national laws in many countries. Currently, UNFPA is trying to raise $100.5 million for more of these “reproductive health service kits”.
This raises serious questions about whether UNFPA should be disbanded in its entirety. It is disconcerting that this agency is known to conduct all-out assaults on developing countries, threatening the jobs of diplomats in these countries, and threatening to withhold development aid that many governments depend on, unless they accept UNFPA’s demands to provide abortion services. The U.S. government, in 2017, withdrew funding from UNFPA because it was cooperating with China on its compulsory abortion and sterilization policy.
This recent controversy at the UN has resulted in victory for pro-life governments and for their untiring diplomats, who refuse to capitulate to UN coercion. At the same time, it was a missed opportunity for UN unity and displayed a tragic disregard for the urgent humanitarian needs that the world expects the UN to provide.
The UN is not carrying out the intended humanitarian purposes expected when it was founded in 1945. Instead, the UN has deteriorated into a global tool to force sovereign nations to accede to left-wing, anti-life policies. The UN has outlived its usefulness.