African faith groups condemned U.N. population conference for its abortion agenda
Pro-lifers protested outside the UN Population Fund summit in Nairobi Nov. 12-14, 2019. Photo courtesy of the pro-life group CitizenGo.
NAIROBI— A variety of pro-life Christian, Muslim and Hindu groups in Africa boycotted a United Nations conference on population and development last week in Nairobi by hosting alternative events nearby.
The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD25) rallied about 12,000 people from 160 countries to ask member states of the UN to support access to sexual and reproductive health, including access to safe abortion, worldwide as a human right and as part of universal healthcare coverage. The UN population fund estimates 232 million women globally who want modern contraception do not use it yet, that 800 women die everyday from preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth, and more than 4 million girls undergo genital mutilation.
The risk of women dying from an abortion is highest in Africa, where about 7 million women admitted to hospitals for unsafe abortions die each year, according to the World Health Organization.
Due to the concern of promoting abortion, the Vatican did not send an official delegation, and an umbrella body of Muslims told its clerics to stay away. The U.S. delegation and 10 other countries expressed its concern with the conference agenda, while the European Union and many others committed their support.
Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, a confirmed Catholic, has often stated his anti-abortion views but helped organize the UN conference. In his speech at the official opening of the conference, Kenyatta pointedly steered away from the abortion debate, choosing instead to focus on the need to empower women and girls so as to access quality health care and fight harmful practices like female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage.
Agnes Kioko, the African Campaigns Director for the pro-life group CitizenGo, organized supporters to sign a petition to President Uhuru Kenyatta and other African leaders to not support the abortion agenda.
“Africans are being blackmailed: if you want development aid, you have to embrace abortion,” Kioko said. “The agenda of this conference does not represent the spirit of African culture, which is predominantly pro-life, and the Constitution of Kenya, which declares life begins at conception and unborn babies deserve the right to life.”
CitizenGo says it and other pro-life groups were banned from attending the UN event. Some of the pro-life groups held peaceful demonstrations along Nairobi streets and parliament.
“Our input at the official meeting is being restricted because organizers see us as a threat to their radical agenda,” Kioko said.
The African voting block of the UN includes 54 member states, one-fourth of the voting members. The conference marked the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.
Some religious leaders, like Redeemed Gospel Church Bishop Kepha Omaethe, had asked the Kenyan government to investigate what the conference was really about. The Redeemed Gospel Church is an international ministry with more than 2,500 churches across Africa and its diaspora across other continents.
A day before the conference, William Ruto, an evangelical and deputy president of Redeemed Gospel Church, spoke about the conference agenda at a meeting to initiate a new bishop 300 kilometers west of Nairobi.
"We will agree on issues of fighting gender-based violence and FGM, but if they bring issues against our African culture then we will not agree with them,” Ruto said. “We will not allow some foreigners to take advantage of our hospitality to advance their ulterior motives.”
On the final day of the UN meeting, the head of the U.S. delegation Huber Valerie argued that the U.S. won’t vote for any agreement that supports abortion. Valerie spoke at a press conference with some Kenyan members of parliament.
“We are also concerned about the content of some of the key priorities of this Summit,” Valerie said. “We do not support references in international documents to ambiguous terms and expressions, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), which do not enjoy international consensus, nor the same reservations or caveats which are applied to similar terms.”
Brazil, Belarus, Egypt, Haiti, Hungary, Libya, Poland, Senegal, St. Lucia, and Uganda, under a joint statement led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), also agreed that “there is no international right to abortion.” The HHS said it would have appreciated more transparency from the organizers of the UN event, claiming pro-life groups were left out and it was not clear how civil society could participate.
At one side event, Muslim, Hindu and Christian groups signed a statement saying giving contraception to teenagers, as suggested by the UN Population Fund, is not a solution for HIV/AIDS, STIs, or teenage pregnancies, according to DevEx.
Meanwhile, the European Union delegation said it will continue to support access to “informed reproductive health choices for women” worldwide and are committing some 1 billion euros towards that effort.
The Ford Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Philips, the Christian non-profit World Vision and many other organizations also announced combined pledges of about $8 billion, according to the UN Population Fund.
Tom Osanjo is a Nairobi-based journalist.