JUNE 21, 2021 By Neydy Casillas
Amid a global pandemic during which the world’s poor are dying daily due to limited access to hospitals, medicine, and proper treatments, the United Nations is exhibiting a preoccupation with pushing countries to legalize abortion, hormonal treatments, gender-affirming therapies, same-sex relations, and more.
The Human Rights Council, an agency within the U.N., is responsible for ensuring human rights are respected by member states. To accomplish their goals, the agency relies on people they consider “experts” within the field. One of these so-called experts is the rapporteur on the right of physical and mental health, Tlaleng Mofokeng.
Mofokeng recently convened, on behalf of the U.N., governments, civil societies, members of academia, and others, a committee to contribute to a report on health concerns throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than focusing on life-saving actual health practices, the report will focus on sexual and reproductive health – in short: abortion.
The primary interest of the U.N. report is not in dealing with the consequences of the pandemic, but instead on advancing a radicalized leftist reproductive rights agenda. Rather than ensuring that those in developing countries have access to quality care and medicines, the U.N. is focused on ensuring that abortion is promoted worldwide, that cross-sex hormones are readily available, and that doctors performing sex-change surgeries face no limitations.
This approach is outrageous. According to the World Health Organization, every minute five children die in developing countries from malaria and diarrhea due to the lack of clean water. In 2019, an estimated 5.2 million children (mostly under the age of 5) died from preventable and treatable causes; most are newborns under 28 days.
The World Bank estimates that around 3.4 billion people still face enormous difficulties in meeting the population’s basic needs, such as water, sanitation, education, health care, and job creation. Ignoring our world’s reality, the U.N. and its “experts” are preoccupied with ensuring that countries will continue killing babies around the globe and delivering hormones and sex-change surgeries without caring how these services are performed.
The U.N. forgets that they are not a sovereign institution. They cannot create “rights” or impose obligations upon member states, as this is detrimental to the self-determination of all people.
There is no consensus nor a binding obligation for the member states that the U.N. Human Rights Council can use to justify these goals. By doing so, the U.N. and its mechanisms aim to breach countries’ self-determination regarding abortion and reproductive issues. Abortion remains an issue that should be handled as a domestic matter, and U.N. committees and rapporteurs have no legal authority on which to stand.
At this time, it is essential that private charities address the real needs of people who are suffering in times of crisis. We must also make a firm commitment to hold the U.S. government accountable for financing institutions and organizations that use taxpayer money to impose their leftist agenda.