Completing our series on the Nigerian pro-life conference
held in Abuja, Nigeria, on June 5th and 6, we report on a presentation by
Patrick Buckley, UN lobbyist for the Society for the Protection of Unborn
Children (SPUC).
Mr. Buckley in his presentation, ‘The onward march of the Culture of death in the international
institutions’, told the audience of between 1500-2000 people that no United
Nations Treaty or Convention includes a right to abortion, on the contrary he
said, they uphold the dignity of every human life from conception to natural
death.
Photograph shows Patrick Buckley with Antonia Tully and Jean Fleuron of SPUC
In brief the agenda, aptly named, by St John Paul ii, the
“Culture of Death’ attacks the accepted moral code based on natural law and Judaeo
Christian principles, it can and does kill the body and it can also kill the
soul.
The agenda in the International Institutions attempts to
change society by changing sexual and gender norms through the introduction of,
so called, ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ and seeks to:
- ·
Reduce population by making contraception
available globally.
- ·
Deny the right to life from conception and
attempt to declare abortion to be a human right.
- ·
Promote acceptance of diverse sexual activities,
sexual orientations and gender identities.
- ·
Attack marriage and the family and undermine
parental rights.
- ·
Sexualise young people by insisting on the
teaching of so called ‘comprehensive sexuality education’.
- ·
Attack freedom of speech, religion and
conscience.
In his 1993 Encyclical Evangelium Vitae (EV 28), Saint John
Paul II wrote:
‘(…) we are facing an
enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the
"culture of death" and the "culture of life". We find
ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst
of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the
inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life’.
Pope St. John Paul ii, in response to a demarché from
US President Clinton in 2004 saying that the Cairo Conference would create a
right to abortion on demand, called for civil society organizations to attend
the conference and oppose that agenda, resulting in it being halted.
The Beijing conference in 1995 attempted to put a similar
agenda in place but once again the attempt to declare a human right to abortion
was halted and the gender agenda also included in the Beijing proposals was
stopped.
When the attempts to attain the goal of a human right to
abortion through the Cairo and Beijing Conferences, failed there was a high
level decision in the UN to change the rules and to find other ways to achieve
the complete agenda. Two alternative strategies were developed.
The first was a “stealth strategy” which commenced at a
round table meeting in Glen Cove, New York in 1996. Participants from UNFPA the
UN Population Fund, the office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights,
representatives from the UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies and select
NGOs met and developed a strategy to reinterpret existing treaties in order to
find a so called 'right’ to abortion-on-demand, in universally accepted norms,
such as the right to life.
The second strategy used by the pro-abortionists was that of
attempting to establish customary international law by constant repetition of
concepts such as ‘sexual and reproductive rights’.
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Both strategies failed to achieve their goal of abortion on demand.
Mr. Buckley told the meeting that we are entering into very
challenging times in that a number of UN multi year programmes are coming to an
end at the end of 2014 and 2015. The original ICPD (CAIRO) programme ends at
the end of this year, 2014 and both the Beijing programme and the Millennium
Development Goals finish at the end of 2015. The UN is therefore in the process
of arranging the extension of these programmes and at the same time debating a new
15 year programme, which will be known as the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’
or SDG’s. Attempts are currently underway to include the entire culture of
death agenda in the SDG’s
In a way he said, this period is rather like the time in 1994 when
Saint JP ii called Civil Society together to oppose the agenda.
UNFPA and its associates including IPPF and IPAS carried out
a review to determine what is standing in the way of implementing their
complete agenda which involves abortion on demand, so called sexual rights, and
comprehensive sexuality education for minors. They then developed a new plan to
remove the obstacles and fully implement their agenda.
Briefly they identified the Holy See as the major obstacle
standing in the way of their agenda and they decided to
prioritize the sexualization of adolescents and youth.
The new approach can be seen in action when one looks at the recent attacks on the Holy See by both the Committee on
the Rights of the Child and the Committee on torture, which are a blatant
attempt to isolate and silence the Holy See at a critical time in order to ensure their
deadly agenda is accepted.
The new approach can also be identified through the
seemingly never-ending series of regional meetings on youth held at various
venues throughout the world such as the UNFPA, UN ECA and African Union Commission meeting Addis
Ababa in 2013, which published the Addis Ababa Declaration on Population and
Development in Africa beyond 2014, The Colombo Declaration on Youth Mainstreaming
in the Post-2015 Development Agenda’and the Bali Global Youth Forum Declaration
December 2012, to name but a few.
Mr. Buckley then turned to the issue of Comprehensive
Sexuality Education (CSE), which he described as a highly controversial,
rights-based approach to sex education that encompasses much more than simply
teaching children and youth about sexual intercourse and human reproduction.
CSE he said encourages:
• Acceptance
and exploration of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities,
• Promotion
of the use of condoms,
• Promotion
of abortion as acceptable and safe,
• Encourages
youth to advocate for sexual rights,
• Teaches
youth without parental knowledge or consent under the guise of confidentiality
or privacy rights,
• Promotion of
sexual pleasure as a right,
• Promotion of
masturbation as healthy and normal,
• Claims that
access to CSE is a human right,
• Teaches
children and youth they are sexual from birth,
• Encourages
sexual activities too disgusting to mention,
• Encourages
peer-to-peer sexuality education.
Comprehensive sexuality education is completely
unacceptable, it is pornographic, it damages young people and robs them of
their childhood.
Mr. Buckley finished by making a strong and urgent appeal to
the international community to stand firm in the face of these attacks. He told
the conference that we cannot let them win, because what we are dealing with is
actually the lives of the children of this and succeeding generations, our children
and our grandchildren.
Children, he said, have a right to a child hood and programmes
like this are completely unacceptable.
The first week in April was not a good week for UNFPA, the UN
Population Fund which was first given the news at the outset of its conference, the Commission on Population and Development, that the Trump Administration
had decided to withdraw funding of around
$75 million on the basis that UNFPA’s activities in China are complicit with
that nation’s coercive population control program, the implementation of which
includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization.
In recent years the negotiating strategy adopted by Western
governments has been to insert many references to controversial issues in
documents during the negotiating period and rely on the chair to issue a
compromise text which inevitably retains some of those issues.
Babatunde Osotimehin, Executive Director of the United
Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), expressed regret that the Commission had been
unable to reach consensus on its outcome document for the second time adding
that it was clearly a challenging time for the Commission. As population age
structures changed, commitment to improving the lives of women and girls was
becoming increasingly important, he said, and he urged all Member States to
continue their funding of UNFPA so as to restore its core budget.
