Youth Blog

To anyone in the pro-life movement, the UN is viewed as a harmful international organization of countries. Many people may question the relevance of our delegation attending UN events, given our beliefs, that are generally in opposition to the UN’s current objectives. I struggled to defend the role of a pro-life non-governmental organization (NGO) at the UN.  

As a former political science major, I'm well aware of the reputation of the United Nations, both at the domestic and international levels. It was a running joke that the UN stood for "Useless Nations" rather than United Nations, but we were far from the truth. While the UN has historically passed some good resolutions, it is clear that they now hold an anti-family, anti-science and anti-life agenda. Most resolutions passed by the UN are non-binding on member states, so why does this matter? These resolutions matter, as they are binding on UN agencies like United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and UN Women. These organizations take advantage of gaps in education, healthcare, economic opportunities and aid to push their agenda on non-western nations. 

The UN agenda is visible through the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), especially in Goal 5 listed as "Gender Equality". Goal 5 does have some good targets such as eliminating discrimination and harmful practices like female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriages, Target 5.6 clearly states that they want to "ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences". Two things to note in these UN texts are the use of the words gender and reproductive rights. The UN doesn't define gender as male and female but rather any gender identity, such as non-binary, genderqueer, and transgenderism. Sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights is also a common phrase for access to birth control, abortion and other artificial reproductive technologies like IVF and surrogacy. As you can imagine, these concepts and practices are not accepted or popular in conservative countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. These words appear often in documents that are binding on UN agencies. Aid given to more conservative nations by UN agencies is used as a vehicle to push gender ideology, abortion and contraception regardless of a country's laws on such topics. 

For example, one of the events attended last week at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), was hosted by Egypt and spoke about a program launched to keep girls in school, help them gain self-confidence and teach them skills for the economic forum. All these things are well and good till you realize that this program, which is doing such good, is being run by UNFPA. These girls are learning important skills but also UNFPA's beliefs on gender, family and healthcare. This program is nothing but a tool to brainwash young girls and women. (Just for reference, abortion and homosexuality are illegal in Egypt.) Using innocuous programming, UNFPA pushes UN agendas in countries where they are not welcomed or accepted. In 10 - 15 years, the UN will have a group of young women demanding abortion on demand, same-sex "marriage" and acceptance of transgender ideology. This is all funded through richer, more progressive member states like the United States, Canada and the European Union. It is nothing but a way to circumvent a country's sovereignty and push ideological colonization.  

So how do we stop this? This is where NGOs like Campaign Life Coalition, Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), Family Watch International, United Families International, and Alliance Defending Freedom step in. They collaborate with member states, delegations and ambassadors in negotiating treaties, as well as binding and non-binding documents to remove language that is against family values and replace them with family-affirming language. We have to fight for the family on all levels and we can't allow richer, more powerful states to bully and infect smaller countries with our perverse ideologies. We can't allow evil to stand unopposed. As Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".