U.N.-Accountable
JOSEPH BOTTUM’S editorial “No Abortion Left Behind” (Feb. 2) accuses our organization and others of shunning democratic processes in order to promote “unfettered access to abortion.” To the contrary, our purpose is to use democratic processes to achieve our goal–to promote and defend reproductive rights in the United States and around the world. We participate in democracy every time we advocate for better legislation or file a brief in a court or with a human rights body. We advocate and litigate because the constitutions approved by people in most of the world’s countries give courts the mandate to check governmental excesses that violate individual rights.
Ensuring that governments respect and protect the rights of traditionally disenfranchised groups is a precondition of free and fair societies. In fact, in countries where democratic institutions, including legislatures and courts, are strongest, women have won legal protection for their reproductive rights.
Finally, we do not use the term “reproductive rights” as code for abortion on demand, as Bottum implies. It is a phrase embodying a holistic approach to women’s reproductive and sexual health, at the heart of which is the right to decide when to have children and how many. Under such conditions, countries prosper, children thrive, and democracy is the winner.
Nancy Northup
President, Center for Reproductive Rights
New York, NY
I WAS DISAPPOINTED to read Joseph Bottum’s completely inaccurate editorial attack on UNICEF. Bottum’s claim that UNICEF has lost its focus on saving children is way off the mark and lacking supporting facts. Basic health, nutrition, and survival for children occupy more than half of UNICEF’s budget. We spend more than ever on life-saving emergency relief for children in war zones and natural disasters, most recently in Iraq and Iran.
Equally false is Bottum’s claim that UNICEF promotes abortion. UNICEF does not spend a penny on abortion or abortion-related activities. UNICEF has never promoted the legalization of abortion or the expansion of abortion-related services anywhere.
The fact is, thanks to UNICEF’s commitment to children, three million fewer boys and girls will die this year than a decade ago, deaths of young children from diarrheal diseases have been cut in half, polio has been brought to the brink of eradication, and nearly 91 million newborns are protected each year from severe mental impairment through salt iodization. We are the world’s largest purchaser of childhood vaccines, and are pushing to expand the fight against measles, malaria, and maternal mortality.
Today, UNICEF’s commitment to child survival is more challenging than ever, largely because of how drastically AIDS has changed the environment in which we work. There are now an estimated 11.8 million young people aged 15 to 24 who are living with HIV/AIDS and more than 14 million children who have lost one or both parents to AIDS, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
UNICEF is not out there throwing condoms off the back of trucks, but we do believe condoms are a crucial part of the fight against AIDS, along with abstinence and faithfulness to one partner. The U.S. government also buys into this “ABC” (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms) approach to preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS among the young.
Bottum’s right about one thing: We’re not Danny Kaye’s “old international children’s fund,” but we have no doubt that Danny would be completely comfortable with the work UNICEF is doing today. He would know that there is nothing that we do that is not central to child survival, which is why UNICEF continues to be the world’s leader for children.
Carol Bellamy
Executive Director, UNICEF
New York, NY
THE EDITORIAL by Joseph Bottum misrepresents facts about the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Contrary to claims in the editorial, the State Department’s own independent assessment team reported UNFPA’s strong opposition to forced abortion in China and found no evidence the Fund supported such practices. UNFPA does not support or promote abortion anywhere in the world.
The fund abides by the Program of Action of the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development, which explicitly states: “In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.” In line with that agreement adopted by 179 governments, UNFPA promotes voluntary family planning to prevent unwanted pregnancies and eliminate the need for abortion.
UNFPA promotes the basic right of individuals and couples to decide freely for themselves how many children they want to have, when to have them, and to have the means to exercise that right.
Richard Snyder
UNFPA
New York, NY
IT IS INACCURATE to associate UNESCO with the issues Joseph Bottum raises in “No Abortion Left Behind.” Abortion and abortion-related issues do not fall within UNESCO’s mandate. Indeed, UNESCO’s constitution, policies, and programs neither evoke nor call for work or research in the area of abortion. No funds provided either by the member states or extrabudgetary sources are spent by UNESCO on abortion-related activities or materials.
UNESCO publishes and prints numerous publications and is associated with a number of co-publications. When it was discovered last year that some work neither written nor funded by UNESCO had been inadvertently posted on the website of a UNESCO field office, that material was immediately withdrawn.
Suzanne Bilello
UNESCO
New York, NY
JOSEPH BOTTUM RESPONDS: You’d think the staff of the Center for Reproductive Rights would have the sense to keep their heads down for a while. When embarrassing internal memos about what they themselves call their “stealth” campaign have been exposed to public mockery–and when Nancy Northup, the president of the center, has written cease-and-desist letters insisting that “disclosure of this material has caused . . . irreparable harm”–it’s not stealthy of them to come out in public once more to try a last-minute repair job. Irreparable it was, and irreparable it remains.
Northup’s letter to THE WEEKLY STANDARD is a good example of why. Taking exception to my observation of the center’s distaste for democracy, she insists that her lawyers “participate in democracy” every time they file a brief “with a human rights body.” Permit me to say that this is exactly what I mean by a distaste for democracy. Who elected these human-rights bodies? Where is there an appeal against their decisions? Under what theory–except the adventitious fact that they are all on Northup’s side of the abortion debate–does she imagine them to have the people’s consent necessary for the democratic rule of law?
No, the staff of the Center for Reproductive Rights consistently favor stepping around democratic processes to get what they want without the messiness of actually consulting voters. Take a look at their website, where they take credit for the surely undemocratic advance of Nepal’s recent royal dictate that legalizes abortion. Or take a look at the considerate way they treat China’s forced-abortion policy: “National laws [in China] neither criminalize nor restrict access to [abortion]. Rather, some laws reflect a preference for the pregnant woman to undergo this procedure under certain circumstances.” Indeed, China’s “one-child” law has “positive, women-friendly features.”
Now, contrast that with their apoplectic view of the United States: “President Bush turned a blind eye to the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court precedent and women’s health by signing into law an unconstitutional ban on abortion . . . , the culmination of an administration determined to unravel constitutional protections for women’s self-determination, women’s right to make private decisions without government intervention, and women’s right to preserve and protect their health throughout pregnancy.”
The difference is, of course, that an abortion-compelling, antidemocratic Chinese regime is giving the Center for Reproductive Rights universal abortion on demand, while the democratic United States is struggling against it. If Northup prefers to work with Communist dictatorships, that’s her privilege, but let’s not have any more nonsense about her center’s love for “democratic processes.”
Finally, there’s her claim that “we do not use the term ‘reproductive rights’ as code for abortion on demand.” This is not true. On the center’s website, you’ll find a list of what “these rights include.” And, sure enough, there is “the right to safe, accessible, and legal abortion,” exactly where you’d expect it to be. Doesn’t Northup read her own secret memos? She’ll find in them a staff complaint that abortion has become all that “reproductive rights” means. It’s in the section headed: “Expanding Beyond Abortion: What are the other reproductive rights issues we have not been addressing or that we should put renewed energies into?”
THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy, denies the charges in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. And yet, under her leadership, UNICEF has betrayed former director Jim Grant’s vision of a worldwide “Child Survival Revolution” in order to join the lock-step international activists who have made up her circle of friends since back in the days when she was the abortion lobby’s darling in New York City politics.
The Center for Reproductive Rights believes abortion is the most important thing in the world, while the United Nations Population Fund would sup with the devil–has supped with the devil, in point of fact, in China and Peru–if it resulted in fewer babies.
UNICEF had something better to do, trying to provide “basic health, nutrition, and survival for children.” And Bellamy instead decided to turn the organization into a stalking horse for UNFPA and a shill for the abortion NGOs. It’s reached the point that even the Lancet–practically the definition of mainstream, liberal consensus in international medicine–is begging Bellamy to put child survival “back on the agenda.” This is what I meant when I listed her among the fanatics who warp every institution and every occasion to concern abortion.
In point of fact, however, I didn’t directly accuse UNICEF of financing abortions. I said that they had given up feeding hungry children in order to agitate for minors’ access to condoms, require that refugee camps provide abortion services, and hand out sex-education manuals to third-world children. I might have added that they have campaigned for the worldwide legalization of prostitution, driven away the Vatican that Jim Grant found so helpful in his old UNICEF projects, weakened their promotion of breast-feeding because of feminist complaints that it made women look like “milk cows,” and, in the name of girl-power, nearly abandoned the education of boys even in countries where more girls are in school than boys.
Does Bellamy deny any of this? She insists, “UNICEF does not spend a penny on abortion or abortion-related activities. UNICEF has never promoted the legalization of abortion or the expansion of abortion-related services anywhere.” But this merely dodges the issues I raised–or even admits them, in essence, for Bellamy goes on to claim that “basic health, nutrition, and survival for children occupy more than half of UNICEF’s budget.” That’s good, if true. But back in 1992 these consumed 85 percent of UNICEF’s budget. Where is the difference going, the 30-odd percent of a nearly $1.5 billion annual budget that has been transferred away from child survival?
Surely that’s a reasonable question to ask in a world in which, according to the Lancet, international relief could have assisted more than 6 million children who died last year of preventable disease and starvation. UNICEF is supposed to try to save these children, and the United States government donates more than $200 million a year to help them do it.
Instead UNICEF is giving books to Latin American grade-school students that tell them how to have sex with each other and their dogs, according to a series of articles in the Washington Times. Instead UNICEF is installing condom-dispensing machines in Chinese nightclubs. This is obscene and shameful.
The Chinese condom-machine adventure, by the way, was a 1998 project that UNICEF funded for the abortion-provider Marie Stopes International–although in 2002, UNICEF sent an official letter to the State Department declaring it had “no relationship” with Marie Stopes.
Now, in her letter to the editor, Bellamy insists UNICEF “does not spend a penny on abortion.” But UNICEF’s 1996 refugee field manual demands access to abortifacients. Since 1996, UNICEF has helped fund the Population Council’s $1.1 million-a-year program for “managing unwanted pregnancies.” UNICEF’s name is on the title page of the 1998 “Guidelines on HIV/AIDS” that require nations to allow “safe and legal abortion.” In 2000, UNICEF consulted with a pro-abortion NGO called “Family Care International” to produce a manual on how to force countries to legalize abortion. Since 2000, UNICEF has financed South African “LoveLife,” a sexual-freedom advocacy group that gives lessons, inter alia, in the proper love rituals to use after having the abortions it helps women to get. And UNICEF is at this very moment transferring funds to the abortion-providers Marie Stopes and International Planned Parenthood in Sierra Leone.
There are dozens of other examples, all proving that UNICEF does plenty “not central to child survival.” Does anyone think this is what Danny Kaye had in mind when he asked American children to collect coins for UNICEF in those little orange boxes? Carol Bellamy has put the once-admirable children’s fund in bed with UNFPA, the Population Council, Marie Stopes, International Planned Parenthood, and all the rest of the fanatics. Until UNICEF returns to Jim Grant’s “Child Survival Revolution,” American citizens and the United States government should find other agencies for the millions they now give to UNICEF.
UNFPA and THE WEEKLY STANDARD aired their differences back in 2002 when Colin Powell cut off American donations because of UNFPA’s participation in China’s forced-abortion policy. There’s little point in rehashing it now, since nothing has changed: UNFPA is still facilitating coerced abortions in China.
It’s worth noting, however, that UNFPA spokesman Richard Snyder claims, in his letter, that “UNFPA does not support or promote abortion anywhere in the world.” This is one of the most risible lines ever to appear in these pages. You can’t begin to count the UNFPA programs that support abortion. You can’t begin to list the thousands of documents it has published promoting abortion. UNFPA does little besides financing abortion and agitating to change laws against abortion.
Leave aside its willing role in China, and leave aside its direct part in President Alberto Fujimori’s programs in Peru. UNFPA runs 17 percent of its annual budget through NGOs that are quite happy to do its dirty work indirectly. Such organizations, the former director of UNFPA, Nafis Sadik, has explained admiringly, “are willing to take risks that governments certainly won’t, even U.N. organizations won’t, but [national governments and the U.N.] can finance.”
Did I mention that Dr. Sadik is also on the board of Nancy Northup’s Center for Reproductive Rights? This is the answer to Suzanne Bilello’s letter from UNESCO denying an ongoing involvement in abortion issues. UNESCO may now have withdrawn from its website in Thailand the pro-abortion material it got from UNFPA. But all parties to this debate understand that UNFPA is at the center of the interlocking U.N. organizations and NGOs devoted to abortion, contraception, and sterilization. So what was UNESCO doing cozying up to UNFPA in the first place? And why is UNESCO running a “Regional Clearing House on Population Education and Communication” in Bangkok, anyway?
Until there’s evidence to the contrary, I’m willing to believe President Bush did the right thing in returning the United States to participation in UNESCO. I’m willing to believe UNESCO has much improved in recent years. But it would be good to know that UNESCO hasn’t just “withdrawn” such material, but that it understands abortion advocacy isn’t its job. It would be good to know that UNESCO isn’t simply another U.N. agency warped by the fanatics who put abortion ahead of everything else.
CorrectionalFacility
IN MATTHEW CONTINETTI’S “The Many Faces of John Kerry,”(Feb. 9) mention is made of a “memo” from former Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan to Mary Beth Cahill “leaked” to ABCNews. In fact, the memo was a satirical parody written by the political staff of ABC News.
In Noemie Emery’s “Back to 1984” (Feb. 9), we reported that “in 2002, 52 percent of Americans held stock equity holdings; and 29 percent of these owned $1,000 or more.” In fact, the 29 percent referred to those who held $100,000 or more in equities. We regret the errors.
