Recently, Joseph Bottum, writing in the Weekly Standard, disclosed how NGOs such as the Center for Reproductive Rights are promoting abortion worldwide to the extent that organizations, such as UNICEF, which formerly used to feed hungry children and provide medical care, are now mainly pawns in the movement to promote abortion in the name of "family planning" and "reproductive rights". (I meant to blog this when his original column originally appeared, and now I've lost the link)
On the web today, he responds to representatives of the Center for Reproductive Rights, UNICEF, UNFPA, , and UNESCO, who claim that his claims are incorrect.
Page 1 contains a response from Nancy Northrup, President of the Center for Reproductive Rights, and part of another from Carol Bellamy, Executive Director UNICEF.
Page 2 contains the balance of Carol Bellamy's response, and responses from Richard Snyder from UNFPA, and Suzanne Bilello from UNESCO, and Joseph Bottum's reply to their claims.
My experience with talk like this, being a former Unitarian Universalist, which is heavily involved in promoting family planning and abortion, is that the NGO claims are groundless. There are many code-words and disingenuous arguments coming from the abortion lobby. It is indeed true that "reproductive rights" are meant to include abortion as Bottum claims. If the first right is life, it is not possible to consider abortion as a human right.
On Superbowl Sunday, entertaining some old UU-friends, I got into an argument, spawned by the adoption of our daughter, about China's one-child-per-family policy. He claimed that since daughters were typically killed by being thrown in a river before the current policy, that the current Chinese policy is not responsible for the abandonment or abortion of infant or unborn daughters. I begged to differ. It may not be the original reason for treating daughters as pariahs, but it is certainly not doing anything to change their culture in a way that respects the worth and dignity of human life. As far as our government's policy goes, I am glad that we do not support UNFPA, as money sent to China to pay for family planning programs is most certainly used to finance abortions, even if the checks are not directly made out to abortion providers. President Bush is right to stop funding family planning programs that consider abortion to be a legitimate practice for family planning.