By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In Target Africa (Ignatius Press), Obianuju Ekeocha vividly describes the twenty-first century’s version of ideological colonialism. These new, rabid colonialists never give up, and last month some ten thousand of them gathered in Nairobi, Kenya. The stated occasion was the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in 1994. The real reason was their fear that their crusade to wipe out the next generation of Africans was losing steam. And they were mad, very mad.
The 1994 conference, held under the auspices of the United Nations, featured pro-abortion forces (including the Clinton administration) arrayed against a coalition of pro-life Third World countries. A delegation representing the Holy See came on strong in favor of life and family, inspired by the vigorous support of Pope St. John Paul II. As a result, the pro-abortion goals of the conference were thwarted twenty-five years ago.
Well, this time around, the organizers stacked the deck. Spearheaded by the notorious United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), organizers sent invitations under the radar, their “statement” was written before the meeting even began, and the program’s goals were stark and soulless. Foremost among them: “universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
The Nairobi meeting was held not under the auspices of the United Nations, but of a rump assemblage described by LifeSiteNews as “a few pro-abortion UN member states — notably Canada, Iceland, Finland, Ireland, Australia, and Italy — and corporations that included Bayer, the Ford Foundation, Plan International, General Electric, and Women Deliver.” Participants were virtually all rabid advocates not only of abortion, but of the subjection of families and children to the control of a secular, all-powerful state, preferably run by the internationalists at the United Nations.
Organizers kept key details of the meeting private in order to prevent an instant replay of 1994, when the real ICPD concluded that countries should “take appropriate steps to help women avoid abortion, which in no case should be promoted as a method of family planning.” Shorn of its faux “official” disguise, November’s ICPD+25 meeting constituted a pep rally for population planners attempting to hijack the authority of the “ICPD” label in order to pervert it.
Holy See Condemns
The Farce
While the Holy See played a vital role in the 1994 conference in Cairo, it refused to send a delegation to Nairobi. “The Holy See cannot support the ‘Nairobi Statement on ICPD+25: Accelerating the Promise’,” it said, in a tone unusually harsh for the Vatican diplomatic corps. “It regrets that no substantive and substantial consultations on the text were carried out. The Holy See notes that if more time and a truly inclusive approach had been chosen, broader support could have been ensured for the text and for the conference.”
“The organizers’ decision,” the statement continued, “to focus the conference on a few controversial and divisive issues that do not enjoy international consensus and that do not reflect accurately the broader population and development agenda outlined by the ICPD, is regrettable. The ICPD’s…agenda should not be reduced to so-called ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ and ‘comprehensive sexuality education’.”
Kenyan Bishop Alfred Rotich strongly criticized the pro-abortion meeting. “Catholic Church leaders in Africa have joined other Christian leaders to raise concerns about the event’s agenda, which they consider to be destructive to humanity and the values around human life,” he said.
Bishop Rotich, who serves as vice-chair of the Family Life National Office under the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB), didn’t mince words: “There will be about 10,000 people here,” he said, “and we know what they are for, they are not pro-life but they are 10,000 abortionists.”
African Prelates Lead
Pro-Life Response
To counter the radical agenda of the ICPD conference, the Kenyan Christian Professionals Forum (KCPF) and an alliance of international groups (including several governments) sponsored a “Pro-Life, Pro-Family Alternative Conference” event that featured three days of presentations, discussions, and seminars in the archdiocesan basilica, located near City Square in downtown Nairobi. The KCPF “objected to the rump ICPD’s agenda of prostitution, homosexuality, same-sex unions, and the introduction of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) at basic schools.”
At the end of the alternative conference, the leaders issued a statement reaffirming passages in the 1994 Cairo document reaffirming the Right to Life, the fundamental role of the family, and the rights of parents.
Joel Bockrath, executive vice president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), addressed a session of the alternate conference on the issue of contraception in the light of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical of St. Paul VI. His colleague, Research Associate Jonathan Abbamonte, spoke on the myth of overpopulation. Both were inspired by the faith and determination of the hundreds of attendees from all over Africa. Bockrath delivered a new ultrasound machine, a gift of PRI, to a Nairobi crisis pregnancy center, where volunteer doctors and counselors care for women of all faiths and races in the cosmopolitan city of four million.
PRI has now donated ultrasound equipment and training to pregnancy centers in three African countries, but the generously funded UNFPA allies, including government agencies from several childless European countries, are peddling contraception, abortifacients, and abortion everywhere in Africa. Ekeocha’s “ideological colonialists” are devoted indeed, not only to controlling existing populations, but to exterminating future generations — throughout the Third World.
Here arises a conundrum. The Trump administration has made historic strides in defending the right to life and the rights of the family. It has forbidden the funding of abortion through several of the government’s agencies, including the Agency for International Development (AID). But contraception is a different issue. For decades, AID has insisted that basic assistance programs providing clean water, health care, and agricultural assistance must also include “family planning.”
That unsettling fact has troubled African and Latin American bishops for years, but they find no public support among their brother bishops in the United States. Many prelates in the Third World will share their concerns quietly with fellow Catholics, but they hesitate to make public their misgivings. They don’t want to alienate the bureaucracies at AID or the Church’s secular Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) like Catholic Relief Services, which receives a majority of its funding from the U.S. taxpayer through AID.
Nor do they want to embarrass their American colleagues, who have never publicly opposed federal funding of contraceptive “family planning” programs, either within the United States or internationally.
In 2017, President Trump reinstated and broadened the Mexico City Policy prohibiting U.S. taxpayer funding of abortion abroad. Within six weeks a consortium of European countries had pledged $250 million to fund abortions and other “family planning” efforts in Third World countries. They didn’t consult Obianuju Ekeocha. They didn’t take a poll of African women. When you declare war, do you ask the enemy’s permission first?
Pro-life groups are working all over the world to save babies. For some reason, political leaders who have no children of their own don’t want anyone else to have any either — at least if, in the spirit of Planned Parenthood foundress Margaret Sanger, those children are black or brown.
The “ideological colonialists” are fighting hard. The people of Africa are fighting back. Let’s help them.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress