Iulia Elena Cazan
(ZENIT News – Center for Family and Human Rights / Nueva York, 12.28.2023).- International abortion groups and UN agencies are influencing the development of massive propaganda programs in Africa. With government officials, they are carrying out large-scale advocacy campaigns to include abortion as an essential health service.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report committed to coupling health services and abortion in Southeast Africa and that no country in that region, such as Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Malawi among others, will be able to attain universal health care without universal sexual and reproductive care.
The report admits that access to contraception, pregnancy care, and HIV treatments are already partially included in many universal health care packages in that region. Still, UN agencies push for the inclusion of abortion access and comprehensive sexuality education as “essential” components of health care.
To ensure widespread abortion access in the region, the report recommends “strengthening the digital health ecosystem and related self-care interventions.” Earlier this year, the WHO launched a mobile app to help healthcare providers offer better abortion “care” to pregnant women. The app “takes the individual characteristics of patients and generates patient-specific assessments or recommendations” and helps facilitate remote patient support to “assist” women while performing abortions at home.
The WHO-UNFPA report also shared that a crucial factor in ensuring “comprehensive sexual reproductive health care” is conducting “value clarification” work for providers. This kind of work attempts to “destigmatize” abortion among medical personnel and encourage them to perform abortions. It is clear that many medical personnel in Africa oppose abortion.
Ipas, an international organization whose expressed purpose is to promote abortion all over the world, has a full curriculum on this, the Ipas Values Clarification for Action and Transformation (VCAT), and uses it to knock down medical and religious beliefs about abortion across Africa.
In a recent press release, Ipas claimed victory in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Comprehensive abortion care is now included in the universal health program and boasted that it was one of the key factors in making this happen.
Such policy change did not come about solely by mobilizing civil society organizations. Ipas offered SRH training to government officials, including the DRC Health Ministry personnel. Ipas said it was able to find supporters inside the government. It is clear that money played a huge role in the shift. The Ipas director in the Congo said as much, “the existing government budget is unable to finance integrating abortion care…Ipas is working to secure this missing funding.” It is likely the missing funding came from the Biden administration.
While celebrating Universal Health Coverage Day, Ipas said that “a powerful joint statement signed by 60 countries emerged from the United Nations General Assembly in September that calls for sexual and reproductive health and rights to be an essential component of UHC.” This was not a document of the UN General Assembly, however. An international right to abortion has never emerged from the General Assembly and a significant number of UN members consistently delivered statements at the UN clarifying that they do not consider the term “sexual and reproductive health and rights” as to include abortion.
