By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For documentation and a much more detailed dossier on UNICEF, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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Many of us remember little ghosts and goblins appearing on our front porch every Halloween with their plastic UNICEF baskets in hand. Today, UNICEF fundraising has evolved, and almost all international airports have large clear UNICEF plastic bins for travelers to deposit their unusable foreign currency. In many developing nations, the UNICEF logo is almost omnipresent — on billboards, on UNICEF vehicles, in the papers, and, most important, in people’s minds.
UNICEF was enormously successful at accomplishing its original mission of providing emergency food and health care to children in countries that had been devastated by World War II. It soon turned its attention to fighting diseases that had a disproportionate impact on children, including tuberculosis and malaria. In 1965, UNICEF won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work and for decades enjoyed the best reputation of all of the large international charities.
Unfortunately, every one of the more than 100 large international aid groups has been infiltrated and subverted to one degree or another by people who sincerely believe in the message of National Security Study Memorandum 200 — that a large population automatically dooms a developing nation to a permanent state of poverty.
Before about 1985, the big charities concentrated on providing the “big four” in crisis and war situations — clean water, food, shelter, and vaccinations. But in the mid-1980s, this morphed into the “big five” with the addition of “reproductive health.” Some of the large international aid organizations simply accepted this formula because they believed that it made sense. But UNICEF and others have gone much further and have embraced the entire anti-life agenda with gusto.
The degeneration and diffusion of UNICEF’s original mission began in about 1965, when the organization conducted its first major population control program in Pakistan by distributing millions of IUDs. UNICEF was involved in a number of large population programs over the next three decades, but treated them more as a sideline. Population control became a central concern for UNICEF in 1995, when President Bill Clinton appointed radical pro-abortion feminist Carol Bellamy as its executive director.
Anyone interested in learning about the subversion of the UNICEF mission should consult C-FAM’s excellent White Paper entitled United Nations Children’s Fund: Women or Children First?
UNICEF’s Current Activities
UNICEF’s Annual Reports show that most its current activities are laudable indeed. However, these reports do not tell us what UNICEF is doing behind the scenes. As an organ of the United Nations, UNICEF is required to adhere to the treaties, covenants, and initiatives adopted by the UN, including the Millennium Development Goals, which call for universal access to “reproductive health.”
UNICEF first officially endorsed “good quality abortion services” at the 1987 International Conference on Better Health for Women and Children in Nairobi, Kenya. UNICEF currently works closely with many of the world’s largest pro-abortion organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. UNICEF even provides abortion machines. The Latin America-based international abortion promoter IPAS advised potential clients that its “manual vacuum aspirators” (for village abortions) are supplied by the UNICEF Warehouse Catalogue.
But UNICEF goes even further. For two decades, it has financially supported UNFPA’s implementation of China’s “one-child family” policy. Incredibly, UNICEF has praised China as the most “baby-friendly” nation in the world, despite wide documentation of forced third-trimester abortions and infanticide in the nation’s “dying rooms.”
UNICEF works in almost all developing nations to “program” youth to “exercise their rights to survival and health by making informed and responsible decisions on sexual and reproductive health.” Most of the time, these decisions involve the distribution of condoms and other contraceptives by UNICEF.
UNICEF has also co-published several major “how-to” guides on getting children to believe that contraceptives are indispensable, and then supplying them to those same children. For example, in 2006, the Population Council, the UNFPA, UNICEF, and UNAIDS cooperated in publishing Investing When It Counts: Generating the Evidence Base for Policies and Programs for Very Young Adolescents — Guide and Tool Kit.
Right at the beginning, the document defines “very young adolescents” as “children aged 10-14.” The entire focus of this publication is beginning and implementing “reproductive health” for these young children, including explicit sex education and condom use. Abstinence is barely mentioned, and the words “mother” and “father” appear only as elements in survey questions.
The “Tool Kit” asserts that “condom provision should be strengthened” among girls from 10 to 14 years old, that people should not judge them for having sex at such a young age, and that one of the factors that interfere with such young people’s rights is the “illegality of abortion.”
All of this and much more is contained in this publication, which is designed to increase “reproductive health” use by very young girls, thus exposing them to exploitation and much worse.
One gets the feeling that UNICEF churns out long, complex documents on children without consulting any actual children. After all, who can imagine a little ten-year-old girl squeakily demanding condoms or the right to abortion?
UNICEF also targets young children through the Internet. One of the more bizarre of the many youth-oriented web sites it funds is South Africa’s LoveLife, which encourages children from ten years old and up to masturbate (the web site says “start practicing!”), to use contraception, to have abortions without parental consent (“You don’t need permission from anybody to have an abortion”), and to try homosexuality and bisexuality (“Why let body parts limit the power of love?!…Most people fall in love with someone of the same sex at least once in their live…”). The web site also instructs young children in sexual foreplay (the web site says, “After, you could always share your special tricks with us!”).
Many UNICEF officials have no trouble with direct political advocacy, demanding that developing nations legalize practices that are harmful and abhorrent to their cultures and customs. For example, Urban Jonsson, UNICEF Eastern and Southern African regional director, has called for the legalization of prostitution and for UNICEF to make condoms available “for everybody, everywhere, and at all times….Let us stop the almost metaphysical debate on the pros and cons of the use of condoms. Abstinence is simply not a realistic option for most young people in the world today….[We must support the movement to] “decriminalize sex-work and facilitate the organization of sex-workers.”
It is apparent that UNICEF is not particularly concerned about the customs, cultures, or laws of the nations it operates in. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 20 years suppressing the fertility of the women of developing nations.
UNICEF has been involved in hundreds of population control projects in the developing world. Some typical examples in a single year are: Distributing abortifacient “contraceptives” in Jamaica; contributing to World Bank projects that established sterilization facilities in Kenya and Malawi; financing a UNFPA/WHO project for mobile sterilization units in Nepal; funding UNFPA/IPPF projects in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe that supplied abortifacients; and sponsoring the formation of committees in 15 African nations to expand contraception, abortion, and sterilization, and attack indigenous family values.
In 1995, the Catholic Women’s League of the Philippines won a court order halting a UNICEF anti-tetanus program because the vaccine had been laced with B-hCG, a hormone that sterilizes and causes miscarriages in its recipients.
Because of its dedication to population control, the Vatican ceased its symbolic UNICEF donation in 1997 since the agency refused to provide a detailed accounting of its population control and pro-abortion programs.
Conclusion
The United Nations has a free ride with mandatory donations from many developed nations. Therefore, it feels that is has little accountability to these donors. A 2012 audit found that UNICEF had piled up billions of dollars of surplus cash, and could not account for hundreds of millions of dollars. UNICEF refused to answer questions after failing this audit and, despite constantly claiming that it is dedicated to “transparency,” refused to disclose details of wages, salaries, travel, consultant costs, and other items.
Unfortunately, those who give to an international aid charity are also giving to population control and other objectionable causes. Even groups like Heifer International, Helen Keller International, and Doctors Without Borders are involved in either carrying out or funding population control activities.
Until this mess can be cleaned up, it might be best for the time being to give to your local crisis pregnancy center.
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