The U.S. will subsidize a new $500-million United Nations agency that conservatives say will likely promote an abortion agenda.
In what the United Nations deemed as a historic move, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously voted on July 2 to approve "U.N. Women," an agency intended to accelerate progress in achieving gender equality and women's empowerment.
While funding for the new agency's agenda will come primarily from voluntary contributions, the administrative costs of running the agency will come from the U.N.'s core budget, to which the U.S. is a major contributor.
The U.N. Committee on Contributions advises the General Assembly, under Article 17 of the United Nations Charter, on how much members will pay, based on each nation's capacity.
Currently, the United States pays for 22 percent of the U.N.'s core budget.
The new agency is drawing negative reaction from conservative leaders concerned that the U.N. will use taxpayer dollars to take a step toward a worldwide right to abortion.
"This will be a massive waste of taxpayer funds," Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, told CNSNews.com. "It's a jobs program for women with elitist views and, like every other U.N. agency, will be plagued by waste, fraud and abuse. To help women who really need it, funding should go straight to the people and programs doing the work, not a bureaucratic middle-man that will host expensive conferences and lavish salaries."
She called the agency's workings a "surreptitious" effort, believing that the agency's agenda extends much further than promoting abortion.
"The priority of the leaders who orchestrated the development of this 'uber-agency' is sexual and reproductive rights. That means abortion and sexual license -- homosexual, lesbian, prostitution, etc.," she told CNSNews.com.
Furthermore, she said that the agency would move to forcefully impose its views on the rest of society.
"This agency would use power and money to coerce countries to accept their policy and legal demands. With a high-level position of Under-Secretary-General and offices within countries, it can work top-down and bottom-up to pressure governments to do what it wants," she said.
Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, believes that abortion will have a prominent role in the new agency.
"Certainly promoting a right to abortion will be a part of the agenda of this agency," he told CNSNews.com.
U.N. Women consolidates four U.N. women's agencies into one super agency that will be concerned with matters it sees as important to women.
It will operate under the direction of an under secretary general, which the Secretary General of the United Nations appoints.
"I have made gender equality and the empowerment of women one of my top priorities — from working to end the scourge of violence against women, to appointing more women to senior positions, to efforts to reduce maternal mortality rates," said Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Ruse said that the U.N. uses the term "maternal mortality rates" as a "stocking horse" for abortion.
He also challenged that the deaths resulting from pregnancy complications are much lower than the U.N. claims.
"For years, and this is a very important point, the United Nations has used a figure of 500, 000, that 500, 000 women die each year of pregnancy related causes. We have never believed that figure. It's a big figure. It scares people and the purpose of scaring people is to say 'Well, the answer to this is legal abortion,'" he said.
The terms "reproductive health" and "reproductive rights" are the "code words" the U.N. uses to promote the abortion agenda, Ruse told CNSNews.com.
Contact: Christopher A. Guzman
Source: CNSNews.com
Date Published: July 14, 2010
