The Trump administration reaffirmed its commitment to protecting the rights of women in and outside of the womb this week at an international population summit.
The Nairobi Summit on International Conference on Population and Development 2025, which is happening in Kenya this week, largely is a meeting of abortion activists and pro-abortion political leaders, according to the Heritage Foundation.
Hosted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the summit is focusing on supporting and promoting abortions and recognizing the killing of an unborn child as a human right. The leading groups insist that abortion and reproductive rights are “the bedrock of gender equality,” The Guardian reports.
Pushing back against the pro-abortion agenda, Valerie Huber, the United States special representative for global women’s health, told the summit that America will not support abortion.
Instead, Huber said the U.S. is investing programs that support the human rights of all women and girls “without compromising the inherent value of every human life – born and unborn.”
Other pro-life voices have been shut out of the conference. According to the Heritage Foundation, the summit leaders blocked conservative organizations from attending and refused to allow leaders of pro-life countries to offer input.
Ann Kioko, campaigns director for CitizenGo in Africa, told the Guardian that the summit would not allow them to attend.
“They [organisers] never allowed us, the pro-life and pro-family people, inside the ICPD25 summit. We were going to protest from the summit,” Kioko said. “We don’t agree with the agenda of ICPD25. We have made it very clear that its agenda is not [what] we stand for. Even the president has made it very clear, saying we have to stand for the family. Even members of parliament and members of the church have spoken very clearly. The US has spoken against the event.”
Police also postponed a pro-life march organized by the Kenya Christian Professional Forum because of security problems, according to the report.
Huber, one of the few pro-life voices allowed to speak, told the summit leaders that they should focus on ending horrific abuses such as human trafficking, female genital mutilation and child marriage. She also encouraged world leaders to offer women alternatives to abortion as part of their family planning programs.
“The US is committed to promoting a healthy understanding of child spacing and non-coercive family planning to help couples either achieve or prevent pregnancy. The US is the largest bilateral funder for family planning. That hasn’t changed,” Huber said.
She emphasized that “abortion is not a method of family planning” and programs should provide alternatives to abortion instead.
Other speakers at the summit included leading pro-abortion activists with the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International.
The summit is not just empty posturing. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, of New Jersey, a leading pro-life advocate, said the agenda determined at the summit can affect third-world countries that depend on foreign aid.
The UNFPA has little effect on U.S. public opinion and or policy. But in the least developed countries its unrelenting pressure to allow access to abortion has an outsize impact. Any unwillingness to conform—even when it violates local religious and cultural norms—could mean the loss or reduction of foreign aid for unrelated humanitarian initiatives especially from the U.K., the Netherlands and Nordic countries, as well as nongovernmental organizations and multilateral organizations.
The Trump administration has been pushing back aggressively against the United Nations’ pro-abortion agenda and insisting that countries support women and children, born and unborn.
In 2017, President Donald Trump stopped giving American tax dollars to UNFPA because it pushes abortions on other countries and has worked with China for decades to implement its forced abortion population control policies. Trump renewed the order again in 2018 and 2019. The decision cut $32.5 million in funding from the UNFPA budget.
Trump also defunded the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International of about $170 million in American tax dollars because of their refusal to stop aborting unborn babies.
via Life News
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