UNICEF and Catholic schools.

Toronto, Calgary--UNICEF never gives up. In the late summer of 2002, this pro-abortion, anti-family organization once again tried to convince Canadian Catholic school boards that it is worthy of their support at Halloween time when schools collect money for worthwhile charitable purposes.

In September 2002, UNICEF representatives, for example, met with the Administrative Committee of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, Canada's largest Catholic Board with over 100,000 students, to convince them everything is just fine; each year there are new members on these committees and boards and so each time there is a demand for proof why UNICEF should not be supported. Doesn't UNICEF feed the hungry? Don't they provide wells for water? Don't they do a lot of good? Yes, they do. But UNICEF and its allies in underdeveloped nations are also rabidly anti-family. There are too many people in the world, so let's cut the birthrate wherever we can, is its leitmotif.

When it comes to getting money from Catholics, UNICEF stoutly denies all accusations. In Toronto, UNICEF sent the School Board a fancy document dated September 12, 2002, divided into 4 sections: UNICEF and responsible parenthood; UNICEF and the Holy See; Earmarking policy; Sample school materials. In it they claim that UNICEF

* has never supported abortion services of any kind "but they only treat unsafe abortion";

* they do not support any specific method of family planning "but admit that they try to 'prevent' too many births, too close together or at too young an age",

In other words, they do not support any specific method, they just support all of them.

UNICEF, the document says, does not distribute condoms and has never proposed that this policy be changed; but it admits that "some member states" have proposed to change it.

These views are summarized in a statement by UNICEF's current Executive Director Carol Bellamy, a leading proabortion American feminist who used to head one of the large women's organizations in the United States.

UNICEF's Deputy Director Canadian, Stephen Lewis is another fine upstanding individual and the first politician in Canada to propose making abortions legal, way back in 1965.

The rest of the document would like us to believe that UNICEF's policies are transparent, that the Holy See fully approves of what they are doing, and that the Vatican's suspension of its symbolic contribution to UNICEF in 1996, was based on a misunderstanding.

Calgary Herald

So let us consult the article written for the Calgary Herald by journalist Joe Woodard last October 30 and reprinted by LifeSite News, describing how UNICEF had strayed from its original agenda, which was helping children in underdeveloped countries survive to adulthood. Even before Carol Bellamy's appointment as its director in 1994, UNICEF had begun promoting sex education among children, and population and abortion programs for everyone else. In 1998, it entered into a partnership with The Children's Fund, the World Health Organization, and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). The last is affiliated with International Planned Parenthood--"rich white people preventing the birth of poor, dark babies," as some have said.

Calgarian Mary Doherty, a Catholic volunteer at the Alberta Family Life Centre, explains that UNICEF is part of the global population control agenda pushing abortion:

David Agnes of Toronto, UNICEF spokesman, maintains that they are not involved in population control. He say that they have had a long-standing policy on family planning, but do not provide contraception or abortion. However, in her 1996 booklet UNICEF: Guilty As Charged, Winifrede Prestwich showed that UNICEF's own reports revealed that it had gone well beyond the limits Agnes said it observed.

Here are some of the programs it has supported:

* In 1987, it officially endorsed "good quality abortion services" at a conference on women's health in Nairobi

* In 1993, it supported China's one child per family policy (adopted in 1972 on advice of IPPF (the International Planned Parenthood Federation)

* In 1995, a court in the Philippines halted its anti-tetanus program because the vaccine had been laced with a hormone which caused sterilization and miscarriages. This surreptitious sterilization program had already vaccinated three million women.

* In its 1997 State of the World's Children report, it praised China as the most "baby friendly" country in the world, despite video documentation of starving babies in "dying rooms" in Chinese orphanages (China has a two-child-per-family maximum).

* In 1997 also, the Vatican stopped its symbolic UNICEF donation, since UNICEF refused to provide a detailed accounting of its population-control and pro-abortion programs.

* In 2000, it awarded Ted Turner its "Trick or Treat Partner Award" for his multimillion-dollar-support of global population control programs.

* In 2001, abortion promotor IPAS advised potential clients that its manual vacuum aspirators (for village abortions) were listed in the UNICEF warehouse catalogue.

In May 2001, at a Child Summit in New York, Washington Times writer George Archibald confronted Bellamy with a UNICEF sex education manual distributed in Latin America which endorses abortion, homosexuality, and sex with animals. Bellamy said that it had been withdrawn from circulation, but she was immediately contradicted by health officers from Mexico and Nicaragua.

Austin Ruse, director of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute in New York, says, "We've just got another nasty UNICEF sex-ed manual with graphic illustrations, showing children how to masturbate. UNICEF always gives the standard reply-that those things are done by their national offices. But they do nothing to clean it up."

UNICEF's most vocal critics lament that the organization, founded for the single purpose of aiding the survival of children, is entangled in contentious ideological programs. As the UN secretariat adopts a radical feminist, anti-population, pro-abortion ideology, UNICEF is tainted. Mary Kassian of Edmonton, author of The Feminist Gospel, says, "Hundreds of thousands of children are still dying of TB or malaria, or because they don't have clean water. And the UN is giving them IUDs." +

Footnote:

(1.) UNICEF: Guilty as Charged, pp.30, is available from Life Ethics Centre, 104 Bond St., Third Floor, Toronto, ON, M5B 1X9, Tel: [phone], Fax: [phone], at $8.00 for ten copies or $70.00 per 100, plus postage.