The U.N. Agenda on Family and Country
By Austin Ruse
July/August 2001 Family Voice

In the spring of 2000, 800,000 Kosovars streamed across the border between the former Yugoslavia and Albania. They ran from Slobodan Milosevic and from the NATO bombs. They settled into hastily built refugee camps, and the whole world joined to assist them.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.N. agency in charge of population control and the spread of so-called reproductive rights, participated. But instead of sending food, medicine or clothing, it sent “reproductive health kits” for 350,000 people. The kits included an entire range of contraceptive and abortion-causing technologies.

The Population Research Institute sent me to discover if the women in these camps were being forced to trade their fertility, or their unborn children, for food or medicine. This frequently happens, most recently in Peru, where women had to accept [sterilization] in exchange for food for their children.

Because of the tremendous aid response, I found women did not have to choose between fertility and food. But I found that all the documents U.N. agencies used to provide approval for this “reproductive rights incursion” quoted liberally from U.N. resolutions. Statistics show that the Kosovars, who have the highest fertility rate in Europe, are not interested in the UNFPA’s “reproductive rights.” Yet these documents were used to justify UNFPA’s aggressive attempt to change their behavior.

U.N. resolutions have no force in law. They should be essentially harmless, but they are not, because their ideas enter general circulation and begin a kind of international common law to which national courts have already begun to refer. In addition, governments and international agencies use them to force smaller governments into ideological submission. U.N. agencies and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) use these documents to justify their often-nefarious behavior.

Padilla, a cabinet-level officer reporting to the Nicaraguan president, refused. The development agencies from Norway, Sweden, Germany and others told the president they could not work with him. Nicaragua risked losing millions in aid, so Padilla was fired—and Nicaragua changed its definition.

In the battle at the United Nations, our fight is over language. Major U.N. resolutions result from long meetings and debates, culminating in a special session of the U.N. General Assembly. The most important meeting is the final preparatory committee meeting (prepcom), where the new document is agreed upon painstakingly, word by word. Pro-life NGOs, including Concerned Women for America, work to find the hidden tricks and get objectionable language out. Because of our small number, our work is inherently defensive.

The other side consists mostly of Western radical feminists who try to hoodwink delegates from the developing world. So it is up to Western conservatives to help delegates understand the tricks and remove them from the document.

For example, as a U.N. term, “sexual rights” means anyone has the absolute human right to do anything sexually with anyone else at any time, beginning at age 10. Radical feminists don’t say this, of course, but that is the term’s practical meaning. Diplomats from the developing world don’t readily understand this. In talking about lesbians, for instance, a Pakistani diplomat once asked about the location of “Lesbia.” The term “sexual rights” has now been defeated at the U.N. conferences known as Beijing (1995), Cairo+5 (1999) and Beijing+5 (2000).

Radical feminists introduced “forced pregnancy” into the statutes of the International Criminal Court in 1999. They insisted it meant only the repeated rape of a woman and confining her until she gives birth (as happened in the Bosnian conflict). But legal research showed these exact same feminists used this term in a 1991 Utah court case, in which the term meant a woman could not get an abortion. It took more than six months of steady lobbying to convince the Muslim delegates of this term’s real meaning. It took another year to get the term narrowly defined in order to avoid the intent to legalize abortion.

This hardy band of amateurs gathers again each year somewhere in the world for another radical-feminist attack. A few snapshots tell you how they work.

UNFPA hosted a prepcom in the five-year review of the ICPD in 1999. Called Cairo+5, this meeting took place in The Hague. More than 800 NGOs were allowed to participate; only six of them were pro-life. Conference organizers later admitted having a quota for pro-life groups. However, a small group of determined people, working from exactly the same piece of paper, can have an outsized impact.

The most important U.N. meetings occur in the smallest rooms, where delegates debate the minutiae of language. At The Hague, NGOs got into these meetings. Picture a small room. Government people sit at a large table; lobbyists (NGOs) sit in chairs arrayed around the walls. The debate progresses line by line.

“Sexual rights” comes up. Two pro-life lobbyists sit together: a researcher—a grandmother of 11 who memorizes U.N. documents in her spare time—the other, an NGO lobbyist. The grandmother tells the whispering lobbyist, “Sixty-five governments at the Beijing Women’s Conference objected to ‘sexual rights.’” A few minutes pass. The lobbyist rises, whispers the information into a friendly diplomat’s ear, and sits down.

A few minutes later, the diplomat says, “Mr. Chairman, didn’t 65 governments object to ‘sexual rights’ at the Beijing Women’s Conference?”

“Yes, that is correct. It shall be stricken.”

Another scenario: Picture an enormous U.N. conference room for Cairo+5. The debate concerns the rights of parents regarding adolescent sexuality. The U.S. delegation insists upon reproductive rights for children without parental supervision.

In response, a delegate from the Holy See (the U.N. term for the Vatican) asked me to contact the U.S. Congress. Within 24 hours, a letter arrived from 30 members. It said the U.S. position neither “represented the wishes of the American Congress [n]or the American people.” When we distributed this letter on the floor, the conference stopped for 45 minutes while delegates read it. U.S. delegates remained silent for two days. Then they spoke, and parents’ rights reappeared in the document.

This team of lobbyists, formed at Cairo in 1994, continues to this day. It recently delivered the greatest pro-life victory in U.N. conference history. In June 2000, at the five-year review of the Beijing Women’s Conference, it defeated efforts to expand the availability of abortion and to mandate abortion training for the world’s medical personnel, and radical attempts to introduce “sexual orientation” and “sexual rights” into the document. As a result, many governments and NGOs have issued reports on what they see as the rise of the pro-life movement at the United Nations.

Our opponents wage this war against three sacred sovereignties: the nation, the church, and the family, which stand in the way of the radical notion of self-autonomy. Therefore, feminists insist these institutions must change from how God made them. This change will destroy them.

But we know one day the army of life will march into the city of death and discover it is empty. Their victory will come quickly, almost effortlessly. Members of the victorious generation will wish they could have been fighting with us in these small rooms. This is our hope. This is our certainty.

This article is adapted from an address presented at CWA’s 16th National Convention in September 2000. Mr. Ruse is president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, the first full-time, pro-family office at the United Nations.

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