The Heathens Still Rage
Firm Faith: Right Reason
Enough would have been said on the dangers of the aggressive promotion of abortion, contraception and gay unions, components of the Culture of Death, if an apostle of that school did not recently utter a preposterous declaration about religion. Hillary Clinton, well known wife of former President of the United States of America Bill Clinton herself now a candidate for the exalted office, at the Sixth Annual Women in the World Summit raised the stakes of the imbroglio. Claiming to be pushing some “great unfinished business of the 21st century” which she termed the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their society, Clinton said “Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper”. All that would sound really great except that in Clinton’s context it is all about unrestricted access to contraception and abortion on demand. For good measure she then added: “And deepseated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed”. Many interpretations have followed that particular statement, some suggesting that Clinton was targeting Christianity, being the staunch anti-abortion defence line, to change its beliefs to fit modern fads. One could conveniently dismiss Clinton’s position as the opinion of an obsessed individual but considering that she might just become President of the most powerful nation in the world in 2016, then perhaps, Christians should all pay a little more attention.
The UNFPA Contradiction
It is no longer news that many organizations now work in Nigeria which have no other business but to promote such ideas as Mrs Clinton’s. Prominent among them is the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, which has former Nigerian Minister of Health as Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin. On paper, UNFPA basically promotes “the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity....” One of its aims is to ensure that “every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect”. Its work involves the improvement of reproductive health; including creation of national strategies and protocols, and providing supplies and services to minority groups, as well as internal migrants and refugees, the elderly and the handicapped. The organization has been known for its worldwide campaign against obstetric fistula and female genital mutilation”. For all these activities no one would fault UNFPA and the entire world would embrace its programmes. The problem is in explaining UNFPA’s vigorous pushing of contraception, abortion rights and other dangerous artificial family planning methods as means of population control and qualitative living thereby saving many lives and destroying many as well. Someone does get killed when an abortion takes place and that human being is certainly not considered in UNFPA’s scheme. So often, such organizations deploy dubious statistics and fabricate fake consensuses to back up spurious claims about population and development. As a result of their clout, many people of goodwill simply give up and resign to fate.
Truth is never conquered
In the face of falsehood truth is never fully conquered. Good news filtered in right after the 48th Session of the Commission on population and Development (CPD) that abortion activists had failed in their bid to push abortion into the Post 2015 agenda for development and outline of the new development goals. Developing countries simply rose against the profuse references to decadent programmes of population control, adolescent sexual activity abortion and comprehensive sexuality education for children at the expense of real developmental needs. The developing nations, refreshingly led by Nigeria through Ambassador Usman Sarki (God bless him) perhaps for the first time ever, grounded the attempt to impose, after a whole week of deliberations and negotiations, a dubious consensus which would compromise values and beliefs that respect life from conception and which value the critical role of the family. Supported by other nations like the Pacific Islands, developing nations overcame blackmail and organizational intimidation to rather demand the simplest of needs like life-affirming healthcare, potable water, food, sanitation, education and employment, all services that affirm the dignity of human beings. They simply showed that while decadent civilizations see population growth as an obstacle to development, developing nations count their population as part of the resources which enhance development. They have the right to do so. Marie Smith, Director of the Parliamentary Network for Critical Issues, put it neatly “The failure to reach consensus at CPD sends a strong message to the United Nations that countries have had enough of the pressure to conform to a ‘radical foreign agenda’ at a crucial time as the process to determine the Sustainable Development Goals continues through July with the General Assembly adopting the goals and targets in a special session in September”.
This too is Good News
One man, however, expressed reservation at this affirming outcome. Babatunde Osotimehin regretted that the text was not adopted because inside it is “all the things we wish to see” in order to jump -start a sustainable world in Post 2015. He obviously was dancing to a different tune from the developing countries who rejected the text and all the things Osotimehin saw in it. As Pope Saint John Paul II wrote in his encyclical letter, Evangelium Vitae, “Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has charactreristics making it particularly serious and deplorable”. Considering Hilary Clinton’s declaration, people of all faiths simply must resist the mixed imperialist agenda which sounds attractive but relentlessly undermines human life, family and time-tested spiritual and cultural values. People like Ambassador Usman Sarki deserve our admiration and support in that regard.