UN's Kofi Annan: Curb world poverty; abort

Women's Issues: Feminism, Abortion, Women's Right to Choose (to Kill a Foetus)

Why is it wrong to allow a woman to have a test for whether her foetus is male or female if she might want to abort a female "because it is female" . . . but it is all right to abort if this child would interfere with her aspirations, her income . . . her vacation, even?

Related to next post, UNFPA Pitches Abortion as a Means to Reduce Child Poverty

UNITED NATIONS, July 4, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In one of its most thinly veiled references to overt population control ever, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has come out advocating abortion as a means for curbing child poverty, improving child education, and improving the sustainability of the environment.

At the UN’s annual Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting running throughout July the UNFPA has been circulating a report, Reducing Poverty and Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: Arguments for Investing in Reproductive Health & Rights. The report argues that “sexual and reproductive health services” – a UN euphemism for abortion, contraception and sterilization – are necessary to eradicate child poverty, AIDS, and even to ensure ecological sustainability by calming population growth.

By eliminating children through abortion, there will be fewer children to become impoverished – or so the UN geniuses who thought up the proposal claim. In addition, if families allow fewer children to survive pregnancy, there will be more resources available for the remaining ones, thus ensuring them a better education, the same reasoning proposes.

The UNFPA document was launched in time for September’s Millennium Summit+5, expected to be the largest gathering of world leaders in history.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a press release preceding World Population Day, 11 July 2005, praised the ideals of the UNFPA in promoting abortion as a means to curb world poverty: “On this World Population Day, let us resolve to empower women and girls by our commitment to gender equality” – gender equality here, again, being a reference to abortion and contraception. “And let us remember that every society that wishes to overcome poverty, hunger, armed conflict and disease must draw fully on the talents and contribution of all of its members.”

The UNFPA report includes a copy of the Stockholm Call to Action, which called for “universal access to reproductive health by 2015 as a target for MDG 5."
Reproduced from: LifeSiteNews

Background: Why Am I Not Surprised???? The Hanscom Family Weblog, October 16, 2004

"Access to education and health" are code words for "abortion on demand" really.

[. . . . ] In an unprecedented statement, the former and current leaders, including 85 heads of state and government, also called for the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the UN in 2000, that call for greater efforts to sharply reduce global poverty and achieve universal access to education and health by the year 2015.

"This statement is the good news the world is looking for in these troubled times," said CNN founder Ted Turner, one of the business leaders and philanthropists who signed the statement, in presenting it to Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and Deputy Secretary General, Louise Frechette.

[. . . . ] The statement came on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo where representatives of 179 governments adopted a plan of action that affirmed the fundamental rights of women, including their sexual and reproductive rights, and set specific targets for their achievement.

The targets included universal access to family planning, safe motherhood, treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), such as HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites), basic education and greater opportunities for social and economic advancement.

But the Bush administration, which has cut off funding of UNFPA and repeatedly voiced reservations about the ICPD's commitment to sexual and reproductive rights, declined to sign on to the statement.

[. . . . ] The United States . . . abruptly changed course after Bush became president six years later.

[. . . . ] Last spring, senior officials even threatened to withhold U.S. contributions to other UN and private agencies, including the World Health Organization (news - web sites) (WHO) and the UN Children s Fund (UNICEF (news - web sites)), if they failed to break their links to UNFPA, despite its active role in the global fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS.

[. . . . ] As one of his first acts in office, Bush also reinstated the so-called "global gag rule" first decreed by former President Ronald Reagan (news - web sites).

Under it, foreign family planning agencies may not receive any U.S. foreign aid if they provide any abortion-related services, including counseling or referrals on abortion, or even lobbying to relax anti-abortion laws in their own country, even if they use their own money for that purpose. [. . . . ]

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