August 9, 2011
By Sarah Ryan
HLI America Young Scholar
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) states that its mission is to promote health and opportunity for every man, woman, and child; it attempts to ensure that “every girl and woman [be] treated with dignity and respect.” As a woman, I will gladly stand behind an organization that empowers me, dignifies me, and acknowledges the rights that accompany my femininity and humanity. The UNFPA’s idea of empowerment, however, seems to be limited to the promotion of birth control, and its dignity to the avoidance of children through sterilization. Its acknowledgment of rights is applied narrowly to those women who are “wanted” or who happen to be outside of their mother’s womb. In taking this tack, the UNFPA is in reality accelerating the very discrimination against women and children that they are purportedly trying to alleviate.
According to the UNFPA, one in five people alive today are between the ages of ten and nineteen, with 85 percent of these young people living in developing countries lacking basic education programs. One of the results of the concentration of undereducated youth in these countries is high rates of teen pregnancy; the result of the lack of options and prenatal health-care available for these girls is often abortion.
The solution to this problem is not the elimination of the next generation (which will undoubtedly face these same struggles) but rather the elimination of the catalysts for the current situation—lack of education, lack of prenatal treatment, and lack of postnatal assistance. As Dr. Susan Yoshihara of C-FAM succinctly put it in a recent interview: “[T]he best way to reduce maternal mortality is: skilled attendants at birth, emergency obstetric care, basic health care to include good neo-natal care. This is what dramatically improved maternal health in the developed world in the last century.” The provision of these essentials should me the mandate of the UNFPA. Real choice does empower women; killing our children does not.
In many developing nations, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, child marriage is a common practice which often leads to adolescent pregnancy. The girls forced into these marriages are being dishonored and taken advantage of based on the vulnerability inherent to their youth, sex, and social class. Although child marriage is not a generally accepted custom in developed countries, its presence throughout the world is pervasive. Young girls are forced into marriages in which the husband controls the choice of whether and when to engage in sex. Societies that allow child marriage are quite simply, perpetuating rape. In some cases girls are literally being sold into marriage by their families, which, under the definitions extant even in these countries’ lawbooks, is tantamount to prostitution and slavery. The answer to the degradation and objectification of young girls should not be to provide them with contraceptives to prevent forcible impregnation by her husband (who may also be her attacker), nor to continue the cycle of child abuse by encouraging the young mother to end the life of her own child.
Once again, we must address the root problem, not the people who are suffering its effects. Rather than attack the baby, we should develop campaigns which aim to change the practice of selling children into marriage. We should focus our corporate and governmental energies on attacking rape, child prostitution, and gender-based violence in all its forms.
The UNFPA’s version of empowerment—the elimination of the “problem” of pregnancy by means of the death of the child—repulses me as a young woman, as one who aspires to be a mother, and as a human being. This “solution” (though undoubtedly more economically convenient than addressing women’s actual grievances) perpetuates the very inequalities that often cause the woman’s desperate plight in the first place.
There is an insult lying beneath these purported solutions: it is for you, the abused and vulnerable woman, to bear the responsibility and guilt of “solving” this problem.
I am embarrassed further that my generation so eagerly condones the violence of abortion and the notion that a condom is a cure; for though contraceptives may often prevent pregnancy, they do nothing to stop the domestic abuse and the institutionalized discrimination. The UNFPA is not the only group claiming to speak for my age group by campaigning for universal contraception access. Groups such as Y-PEER (pioneered by the UN) and one of their partners, YouAct, are also active on this front. I am offended that I, as an educated and health-conscious young woman, am identified with the supporters of groups who believe that “access to abortion services should be provided free of charge, including pre- and post-abortion counseling, hospital-care and medical procedure.” These groups, who are so ardent in their characterization of abortion as a “choice,” are tellingly silent on the alternative option of adoption—a choice that truly enables a woman to keep her dignity intact. Abortion is an injustice, not an inherent right; it is an insult to both women and children.
Promoting equal health and opportunity to every man, woman, and child is impossible in the presence of unjust discrimination. This discrimination arises when a mother is coached to kill her child rather than taught how to prepare her body for birth. It is seen when young girls are forced into marriages and sexual relationships because their age and societal mores leave them susceptible to abuse from men. And though hidden, it is present when sexual abuse is cloaked by the panacea of birth control, and when motherhood is labeled a disease. The UNFPA is, then, not merely pushing their own politically-slanted agenda: they are, in their defining of women’s rights merely in terms of access to life-denying “medical” treatments, discriminating against all women—educated and uneducated, victims of rape and forced marriage, born and unborn.
As Blessed Pope John Paul II expressed regarding injustices inflicted upon women: “The Church deplores and condemns, to the extent that they are still found . . . all ‘the customs and practices which deprive women of their rights and the respect due to them’” (Ecclesia in Africa n. 121). The fact that one of the world’s most powerful international organizations has failed to recognize the authentic rights of women and children, and has ignored the dignity of the family, is alarming and calls us to prayer and advocacy to promote the Truth.
“Christ said, ‘I am the Truth’; he did not say ‘I am the custom.’”-St. Toribio
Sarah Ryan is a Young Scholar of HLI America. She writes for the Truth and Charity Forum.
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Aug. 21, 2011, My comment: Unfortunately, there are already ‘next generations’ who will never come into being. consider the fact that over 50 million unborn human babies’ lives have been terminated in the wombs of their mothers; now consider the new lives that those 50 million would have generated, and then the lives that those generated lives would have brought fought – it is mind boggling!!! We are seeing the mass genocide of the human race and so many are either silent or indifferent…it has become, perhaps, commonplace for us. Mother Teresa of Calcutta has said that a nation that kills its young cannot survive and we are barely surviving now. We need to pray and act to bring about an end to this culture of death, while helping to create an authentic culture of life. If we don’t, then our cities and towns will become wastelands…