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New Paper Scrutinizes World Health Organization’s Abortion Agenda
NEW YORK - - (June 23, 2011) - - (C-FAM) How did the World Health Organization become one of the world’s top abortion advocates? A new research paper says it happened by degrees.
As Western countries liberalized their abortion laws during the 1970s and 1980s, they justified the need to make abortion “safe” wherever it was legal. The result was an extensive abortion advocacy, training, and research program institutionalized as a department within WHO in 1998.
According to one of the numerous WHO reports cited in the paper, UN personnel experimented on more than 2000 women to test the lowest effective dose of mifepristone, called RU-486 in the U.S., with a view to making abortion “safer” and less expensive. In South Africa and Vietnam, WHO says it conducted trials using midwives to perform abortions with manual vacuum aspirators, or plastic abortion kits, and WHO staff ran abortion trials on women using the controversial drug misopristol up to 63 days of pregnancy.
The paper’s author, De Sale’s University’s Andrew Essig, criticizes WHO’s drift from its original mandate of health and healing. For example, in this year’s proposed program budget, sexual and reproductive health was given $332 million while nutrition and food safety received only $120 million.
Essig cites international health experts who say funding is driving the shift in mandate. Most of WHO’s funding comes from voluntary sources, and WHO receives significant funding from Northern European countries and private donors who largely promote the sexual and reproductive health agenda. “If the WHO stopped chasing such funds,” Harvard’s Christopher Murray says, “it could go back to concentrating on its true mission of providing objective expert advice and strategic guidance.”
Essig finds the foundations of the new “rights-based” approach to sexual and reproductive health are based on controversial non-binding documents. These include the outcome documents from the 1994 UN conference on population and development in Cairo and 1995 UN conference on women in Beijing.
This has led to an over-emphasis on advocacy, Essig says. WHO’s reproductive health department (RHR) goals include: acquiring evidence of the prevalence of “unsafe” abortion, developing techniques for “safe” abortion, translating the evidence into norms, and assisting countries to change their laws. WHO works with UN human rights treaty bodies to confront countries with restrictive abortion laws with evidence of “unsafe” abortion.
In effect WHO is at the center of an “iron triangle” of abortion advocacy, Essig says. The organization uses reports from abortion advocacy groups such as International Planned Parenthood Federation, who in turn use WHO’s analysis to lend credibility to their agenda. Likeminded governments in the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s voting body, then approve documents prepared by RHR staff as funded programs. “The relationship makes it very hard for other groups to introduce evidence which contradicts the current agenda,” Essig says.
To restore its independence and credibility, Essig recommends that WHO end its human rights activism, reject funding from abortion advocates, and stop using statistics to create a demand for “safe” abortion.
Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. writes for C-FAM. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission. (Title edited at LTGOFVB publication.)
Light To Guide Our Feet Victory Bulletin [LTGOFVBJune 2011]
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