During the first two years of this decade, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly a billion people suffered from chronic undernourishment. United Nations data suggests that children were the most affected – almost half of all child deaths in the world can be attributed to hunger. Five million die every year.
Inaccessibility to clean potable water kills just as many. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 800 million people in the world without access to clean water.
And again children are the most affected – a child dies every 20 seconds from water related illness. Millions more are killed, maimed, and disabled for want of drugs and antibiotics.
Food, water, and medicine – the most basic and most critical third world needs.
So you would think that when the United Nations convened the all-important and always overreaching Annual Commission on Population and Development in Manhattan this year, that those most fundamental needs of the poorest of us would be the primary focus and priority for the delegates involved in the high-level meetings.
They were not.
The theme of this year’s meeting “Trends in Migration,” provided the best opportunity to substantively and seriously address the life and death issues faced by so many in the developing world this year. Instead, the focus of the meeting turned to sex.
Pro-Life Handout at UN Commission on Population and Development
Yes, sex and abortion. Any reasonable person listening to the negotiations would have believed that when fleeing a war-torn region, and you’re injured or hungry and thirsty – nothing provides quite as much comfort as access to a curette wielding midwife with a handful of condoms telling you that “gay is ok.” Food and water? Not so much.
It is painful to acknowledge that as millions continue to die from thirst and hunger, the most powerful far-reaching body in the world is concerned with the sexual rights of 6-year-old girls.
As with most all Commission meetings the goal at this particular one was to produce an “outcome document.” This is the document that enumerates the problems perceived and the solutions the UN will take to solve them. Unfortunately if the perception is that migrants and most other people in the developing world are primarily in need of “sexual rights” the solutions tend to be quite skewed.
Midway through this commission meeting the outcome document being debated included 33 references to “sexuality” and more than a dozen references to “sexual and reproductive health” – a term that some in the international community have tried to twist into meaning legalized abortion even though it clearly does not.
Widely popular Pro-life Meme distributed during CPD.
There was next to no discussion of housing or access to water or safe havens – this meeting purporting to reach solutions to world migration problems once again became a sex-fest. The sexual wants of the 1st world trump the basic needs of the developing world – this is the new normal at the United Nations.
The UN’s self-created gulf between what’s needed and what’s wanted continues to widen.
This disconnect isn’t limited to Commission meetings. A few weeks ago the United Nations launched their “My World” social media campaign and initiative to gauge the problems that should be prioritized in upcoming high-level meetings. On their webpage the My World project is described this way:
My World is a good example of the United Nations’ will to innovate and harness information technologies and social media to foster inclusive conversations.
They make the claim that more than 600,000 “citizens” from 194 countries have voted through their website and mobile phones, stating that:
…we have been able to collect real time information about citizen’s priorities in the context of the future development agenda.
Here’s the thing – if someone has access to a computer, internet and a mobile phone, I would argue that there exists a strong likelihood that they also have access to potable water and medical care. Too obvious?
Some have found it infuriating that in such a needy world the issues that the respondents can prioritize include: Protecting forests, rivers and oceans; Equality between men and women; Support for people who can’t work; Action taken on climate change and so on.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
It’s a novel project, it’s neat and it’s nifty – but would that they’d instead go into the barren desert communities in Saharan Africa or the Andean towns of South America, or the filthy urban sprawls in India and Brazil. There the UN might finally discover what the world really needs.
But as long as world priorities are chosen by those in the sex-obsessed West where pro-abortion UN NGOs and delegates sipping lattes in air-conditioned halls click on colorful internet pages determining what they deem important for the rest of the world, millions will continue to die.
It’s time to narrow the UN’s Gulf of Disconnect. In the meantime, please be sure to visit the UN’s My World website here and take the poll – as Americans we should be most interested in the “An Honest and Responsible Government” priority tab.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the director of Hispanic outreach for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
