Dear Colleague:

The UN conference we have been reporting on continues to go on and on.
When will it end and what will it say?

Steven W. Mosher
President


PRI Weekly Briefing
14 April 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 14

UN Conference Keeps Going
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

The HIV/AIDS conference of the United Nations Commission on Population and
Development was scheduled to end at 6:00pm on Friday, April 8.  That day's
formal meeting began at 6:00pm instead, and then didn't finish its
business.  It postponed completion until the next Tuesday, April 12, and
again until today.  As of this writing, we still don't know what the
conference's final resolutions will say about abortion.
Last week, pro-life activists including myself lobbied delegates to the
conference to adopt an amendment to one of the conference's draft
resolutions that would have removed the possibility that the UN was trying
to create a right to abortion.  Phrases such as "sexual rights,"
"reproductive rights," "access to reproductive health services," and the
like have made their way into various UN documents, including those of
this conference, and their vagueness has allowed UN organs and others to
interpret them to include the right to abortion.  Before that
interpretation becomes ingrained in customary international law,
pro-lifers want to clarify the meaning of such phrases.  Not having the
same flexibility in our schedules as UN diplomats and bureaucrats
apparently do, I and many others on the pro-life side had to return to our
home cities after April 8 and are now hearing about the continuation of
the conference from afar.
For a conference supposed to be about combating AIDS while promoting
economic development, social engineering was high on the agenda.  In their
presentations, delegates repeated the phrases "gender equality" and
"gender equity" over and over.  A so-far-unapproved draft of a conference
resolution says that the commission wants to emphasize "that gender
equality and the empowerment of women and girls are fundamental elements
in their reduction of their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, and emphasizes that
the advancement of women and girls is key to reversing the pandemic."
Delegate after delegate advocated the same policies that have failed to
stop the rapid spread of AIDS in the Third World, and indeed can never
succeed: condoms, explicit sex education, legal privileges for homosexuals
and other such, and so-called women's empowerment.
Reality is never allowed into such debates.  Before 1960, that is, before
condoms, sex education, and women's lib, the prevalence of serious
sexually transmitted diseases was far less than it is today in both the
First and the Third worlds.  In the last two decades, the spread of such
diseases has exploded, coinciding with tremendous increases in condom use;
sex education; and women's educational levels, labor force participation
outside the home, and incomes.  Promiscuity, unnatural practices such as
sodomy, and the sharing of needles by junkies are clearly the causes of
the problem in the First World, and those causes combined with poor
sanitation standards in health clinics have created the problem in the
Third World.  Yet conference delegates downplayed the importance of
abstinence, did not discuss (so far as I could tell) the role of poor
sanitation in spreading HIV, and most certainly breathed not a word
against unhealthy practices such as sodomy.
The United States proposed that HIV prevention efforts stress "the
importance of a comprehensive and effective prevention strategy,
emphasizing abstinence and delay of sexual debut for youth, mutual
faithfulness and partner reduction for sexually active adults, and correct
and consistent condom use by those whose behavior places them at risk for
transmitting or becoming infected with HIV."  The European Union and
Canada opposed this language.  We'll see what ends up in the final
document.  And we'll see, too, about what, if anything, the document has
to say about abortion.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at PRI.
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