Dear Editor,
I laughed as I read the Kaieteur News (13-11-07) article captioned “UNICEF condemns sexual abuse of children”. Another article telling the same story appeared in last Wednesday’s edition of the Stabroek News. I laughed because the other day (I regret it was not earlier) I learned (and I want to share to with all) a lesser-known work that the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) funds and promotes: abortion. Yes, UNICEF is a pro-choice and not pro-life organization that is using donations collected to fund abortion, contraception and sterilization programmes in the Third World.
I consider abortion a very cruel sin that humans commit on innocent, voiceless, children that the very hand of God Himself designed and made. There is so much work currently going on within pro- life causes around the world. The Roman Catholic Church is one of the pillars that uphold and defend the rights of human embryos and is probably the only organization in the world that recommends natural family-planning practices. The Church therefore has upheld in the strictest way, the Fifth Commandment without reserve.
So I find it disgusting to have read that UNICEF is condemning abuse of children, while behind the scenes it is committing same through funding abortion programmes.
Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle of San Salvador has from the pulpit denounced a 170-page sex-education booklet designed by UNICEF and El Salvador’s Ministries of Health and Education for training adolescents on sexuality issues including contraception, homosexuality and abortion, the Register reported.
“The dignity of people, institutions such as marriage and the rights of the family are all practically demolished with this document,” he told Catholic News Service Oct. 6.
The archbishop described illustrations in the manual intended for training 6,000 El Salvador youth to instruct their peers as “insinuating and grotesque.”
Two thousand copies of the manual were printed last year and “about 1,000” were distributed before “objections were raised to some of the content,”Liza Barrie, a UNICEF spokesperson told the National Catholic Register. It covered topics including homosexuality, bisexuality and masturbation, she told the newspaper.
Further distribution of the guide was temporarily halted in August as a result of public opposition to it, Barrie said, and the text is “being revised,” the Register said.
Barrie downplayed the role of UNICEF in the sex-education programme, however, claiming it was one of more than a dozen collaborators and distributors of the manual, along with groups such as World Vision, Save the Children, the World Health Organization and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
“UNICEF and Planned Parenthood are two of a kind,” Winifride Prestwich, a founding member of the Canadian political pro-life lobby Campaign Life Coalition, told the Register. She authored a 1995 booklet, “UNICEF: Guilty as Charged,” which documents the agency’s cooperation with population-control groups including International Planned Parenthood Federation, the World Health Organization, the U.N. Fund for Population Activities and the Population Council to support contraceptive, abortion and sterilization campaigns.
“UNICEF was formed [by the United Nations in 1946] to take care of the war-torn children of China and Europe,” Prestwich told the Register. “It began as a very noble, worthy cause but it was swept up during the ’60s in the old Malthusian theory that overpopulation is leading to world doom, and it strayed very far from its original mandate.”
Over the years, UNICEF has participated in the distribution of millions of abortifacient IUDs and contraceptives in countries such as Pakistan and China.
In 1987, UNICEF formally endorsed a recommendation that “legal, good quality abortion services should be made easily accessible to all women.” By 1992, UNICEF was lobbying for abortion in some countries where it is still illegal, the Register said.
Carol Bellamy, UNICEF’s executive director since 1995, is a former New York senator with an old voting record demonstrating her pro-abortion views. In 1974, she opposed a measure declaring that a foetus that survived an abortion and was born alive is entitled to the same care as other infants born alive.
UNICEF’s current Web page features a “family planning” page titled, “Progress of Nations
