Penna Dexter

It appears that a United Nations agency is blocking pro-life groups from registering for a population conference set to take place in Nairobi, Kenya in mid-November. The conference is co-hosted by the UN Population Fund (commonly known as UNFPA) along with the government of Kenya. This conference marks the 25^th anniversary of the Cairo Conference on Population and Development. Its organizers aim to “accelerate implementation” of the Cairo Plan of Action. At the Cairo conference, delegates agreed on a strategy for stabilizing the world’s population. Non-Governmental Organizations are important players at these UN conferences. Several pro-life NGOs, the major ones who possess UN consultative status, have not yet been accepted to the Nairobi conference. These include Family Watch International, the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, and C-Fam, a pro-family non-profit, headed up by Austin Ruse, that has worked for years to monitor and influence the social policy debate at the United Nations. Austin Ruse points out that at the Cairo conference, ultimately abortion was “cast in a negative light, as something to be avoided...a matter for national governments and not for international organizations, like the UN…” But UNFPA succeeded, for the first time, at getting “reproductive health” officially defined as including abortion in the document produced by that conference. Their goal was to deal with overpopulation. One could argue that today, 25 years after Cairo, those concerns have been replaced by fears of devastating consequences from declining birthrates. So why does the UN need to “accelerate” its efforts to reduce populations? The answer: abortion. UNFPA is all about the promotion of abortion, even coerced abortion. Pro-life US presidents always defund this group when they take office. Pro-abortion administrations restore our giving to this powerful UN agency. UNFPA doesn’t want pro-life NGOs forcing negotiations on the document they’ve already written to bludgeon nations into accepting pro-abortion policies. This cynical effort to magnify pro-abortion voices at the UN must be stopped.