The steady erosion of UN relevance
It is nearly five years since the United Nations family planning agency announced in November 2012 that access to contraception is a human right. Yet no one except the usual pro-life groups has in all of those five years taken the UN to task for promoting extrajudicial killing in a different form when it declared access to contraception as a basic right.
Birth control and abortion are the same as extrajudicial killings except for the circumstances under which they occur. The bottom line is they kill. Worse, the killing is being made universally available to those who want it (as a matter of human right?), according to the UN, the same organization that is very noisy about EJK in the Philippines and one of whose rapporteurs is on the warpath against the country.
At least in the extrajudicial killings that the UN blasts the Philippines about, the victims are usually armed and have at least a shot (pardon the pun) at life by trying to fight their way out. But contraception and abortion are aimed at the helpless and defenseless who have not yet even been born. Why is there a double standard in appreciating issues that deal with the same subject of life or the taking of it away?
Perhaps the answer lies in self-interest. The giant pharmaceutical companies that churn out contraceptive pills and other devices make tons and tons of money, a huge part of which may either go directly to the UN as assistance or to the host countries of these companies in the form of taxes, some of which then go to the UN, also in the form of assistance.
In its 2012 annual report, the United Nations Population Fund called on all the nations of the world to resist barriers that lead women to forego birth control. The call comes hand-in-hand with the relentless effort of the UN to legalize abortion globally. It is truly incredible how the UN and its functionaries can put up a straight face advocating abortion on the one hand and then condemning EJK on the other.
This is not an attempt to justify one over the other but simply to point out the hypocrisy and the inconsistency of the UN in embracing causes. No wonder it is slowly but surely losing respect and relevance in the world it is supposed to represent. That is why its rulings hardly matter anymore, its warnings and admonitions even less. The UN has simply become more of a romantic notion than a de facto practical idea.