From November 12-14, thousands of abortion activists attended the Nairobi summit in Kenya, a conference that was organized by United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the governments of Kenya and Denmark, in partnership with like-minded member states and organizations that promote abortion.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Republican pro-life Congressman Chris Smith said pro-abortion governments and organizations were trying to “hijack the UN’s global population and development work to support an extreme pro-abortion agenda.”
Stephen Mosher called Nairobi summit a “publicity stunt.”
Pro-life groups such as Campaign Life Coalition, the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), Population Research Institute, and Human Life International, have criticized what PRI’s president, Stephen Mosher, calls the “full-throated effort by UN bureaucrats and their pro-abortion allies in D.C. and foreign capitals to promote abortion and population control around the world.” Mosher noted that the 1994 Cairo Commission on Population and Development (ICPD) was hijacked by pro-abortion activists and their allies in Europe and the Clinton administration to promote abortion and population control, but they were thwarted by pro-life non-government organizations, the Holy See, and their allies in South America, Africa, and Asia.
In 1994, the ICPD in Cairo rejected a global right to abortion stating, “governments should take appropriate steps to help women avoid abortion, which in no case should be promoted as a method of family planning.” Furthermore, the ICPD document respected national sovereignty, stating, “measures or changes related to abortion within the health care system can only be determined at the national or local level according to the national legislative process.”
Jim Hughes said the UN has long pushed an abortion agenda.
But as Campaign Life Coalition past president Jim Hughes told The Interim, the UN has used every opportunity at its focused conferences on women, development, housing, and whatnot, as well as at its regular meetings in New York and Geneva, to have abortion declared an international human right.
Conference programs, built through consensus and sanctioned by the General Assembly of all UN members, provide the framework for future coordinated international efforts. CLC reports in its December CLC National News, that pro-abortion delegations and NGOs have harboured “hopes of institutionalizing an international right to abortion. Year after year, they have failed in large part due to the strong pushback from the majority of nations and pro-life non-government organizations like Campaign Life Coalition, who have been prioritizing genuine healthcare needs and combating real human rights violations, over promoting abortion and so called ‘sexual rights’.” But as formal negotiations have come up short for the abortion activists, they “decided to organize their own conference in Nairobi, Kenya, deceitfully labeling it as a 25th anniversary of the Cairo Commission on Population and Development.”
Pro-abortion NGOs who helped plan the Nairobi summit include the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Women Deliver, and She Decides.
The official Nairobi summit website lists Canada, Australia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland as partners, as well as corporate and charitable “strategic partners” such as drug manufacturer Bayer, the Ford Foundation, Plan International, the Special Olympics, Kenya Airlines, and General Electric.
The abortion NGOs created their own declaration document called the “Nairobi Statement,” which outlines all their goals and promises to promote sexual rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights, and radical sex-ed under the umbrella term of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), and they urged nations and organizations to make financial commitments to help realize their goals.
International Planned Parenthood director general Alvaro Bermejo highlighted four key pledges of his organization that, he said, were guided by the ICPD Programme of Action, including “abortion care.” He said Planned Parenthood is active around the globe to “serve a woman, a girl, or a young person, and support their (sic) sexual and reproductive freedom.” He committed his organization to “accelerate universal access to safe abortion by expanding” abortion services by 2022, “with a focus on implementing innovative strategies to reach underserved populations.” He also said Planned Parenthood would “champion reproductive freedom and stand firm against reproductive coercion by advocating for safe and legal abortion.”
However, this conference, which did not invite all member states of the UN, was not representative of the general assembly as only a few nations participated, and pro-life and pro-family NGOs were strategically denied access. The Nairobi summit’s “ICPD25: Accelerating the Promise,” statement, claims that abortion is part of the solution to world poverty and human suffering in conflict areas, and a universal human right.
The Population Research Institute’s Mosher said the Nairobi summit’s planner “held consultations with its allies in secret, drafted the Nairobi Statement well in advance of the meeting, and is determined not to allow any further debate on the language.” Mosher explained, “What is being called the ‘Nairobi Summit’ is thus nothing more than a kind of international publicity stunt, a show put on to promote and publicize the goals of the international pro-abortion, anti-people movement.
Campaign Life Coalition reported that the Nairobi summit organizers “celebrated victory” while “gloating of the billions of dollars that they were able to raise in pledges from governments and private and public sectors.” Yet at the same time, 11 countries, led by the United States, issued a statement declaring the summit illegitimate.
The statement, released by the Trump administration’s Health and Human Secretary, noted that the summit was prepared by a select number of countries and pro-abortion NGOs in secret. “We would have appreciated more transparency and inclusiveness in the preparation of the Conference, including regarding criteria for civil society participation,” the statement read. “Only a small handful of governments were consulted on the planning and modalities” of the Nairobi Summit, and thus “Any outcomes from this summit are not intergovernmentally negotiated, nor will they have been the result of a consensus process. As a result, they should not be considered normative, nor should they appear in future documents as intergovernmentally-agreed language.”
Furthermore, the statement pointed out that the “the Nairobi Summit “is centered on only certain aspects of the ICPD Program of Action and does not fully reflect all views and positions of the Member States,” and the “content of some of the key priorities” concerned the 11 signatories.
The statement was signed by Brazil, Belarus, Egypt, Haiti, Hungary, Libya, Poland, Senegal, St. Lucia, Uganda, and the United States.
Those 11 countries said, “We do not support references in international documents to ambiguous terms and expressions, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), which do not enjoy international consensus, nor contemplate the reservations and caveats incorporated into the Cairo outcome.” It continued: “the use of the term SRHR may be used to actively promote practices like abortion.”
By contrast, the Cairo ICPD Program of Action “was approved by consensus as contained in the report of the Conference and endorsed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly” and “did not create any new international human rights” as it recognized the “sovereign right of each country” to implement policies consistent with nationaI laws and development priorities.”
The Trump administration made clear it intends to focus on human rights violations such as preventing child and forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and human trafficking, and combating infectious diseases, preventing child and maternal deaths, and ending the HIV epidemic.
Adding to the illegitimacy of the summit, there have been reports that the UNFPA drafted a list of commitments to promote abortion, LGBTQ rights, and comprehensive sex education on behalf of the member states of the African Union without their approval. One such commitment in “ICPD25: Accelerating the Promise,” was “access to sexual and reproductive health” as part of universal health coverage and the declaration that abortion was part of a “comprehensive package of sexual and reproductive health interventions” covered under a universal health system.
Smith, in his Wall Street Journalcolumn, said the Nairobi summit was not, as it claimed, a fulfillment of the Cairo conference, but “a gathering of like-minded individuals and organizations departing from the Cairo consensus” that rejected abortion as a universal right.
Before the Nairobi summit, from Nov. 11-13, faith-based organizations and pro-life NGOs, held their own conference, the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum, to oppose the spread of abortion in the developing world. Representatives of C-Fam, Human Life International, and Population Research Institute, spoke about the dangers of the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agenda to women, local cultures, and long-term demographic health of the global south.
The chair of the Kenyan bishops’ family life office, Bishop Alfred Rotich, condemned the Nairobi summit in an interview with Africa’s Catholic News Agency, saying it “destroyed the agenda for life.” In a press conference, the chairman of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Philip Anyolo, said that the bishops view the summit’s agenda “as an intent to corrupt our youth and enslave them to foreign ideologies.” And Archbishop Martin Kivuva of Mombasa told ACI Africa that the program of the conference was motivated by desires to control population growth, not help local populations. “Remember most of this is about population reduction, yet in Europe, there is zero growth and they tell us we are many,” said Archbishop Kivuva. “They tell us that we are poor because we are many. That is a lie.”
