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Outgoing official admits promoting abortion
Key element of population programs
In an interview published by the United Nations Foundation news service, outgoing UN Population Fund (UNFPA) director Nafis Sadik said that she had been very successful in changing policies around the globe in the areas of reproductive health, population issues, and family planning through the promotion of abortion and birth control.
Sadik, who has led the UNFPA for 14 years and has been with the organization for 29 years, said that when the agency began its work, few countries had family planning programs, because contraception was simply not acceptable in many societies. But “now every country in the developing world has family planning as part of its health service, and today every country now has a reproductive health program.”
Sadik also admits that her agency has been responsible for tying developmental assistance to population control. “I think we’ve been able to make the consensus . . . that population issues are part of developmental issues, that they’re not separate, that they link with all facets of social life and economic and developmental life,” Sadik said. “Without pursuing social policies and social goals, you can’t really have economic development.”
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has appointed Thoraya Obaid of Saudi Arabia to replace Sadik at the head of the UN population program, effective January 1. Obaid was the UNFPA director of the Division for Arab States and Europe.
Fears of “New World Order”
Catholic theorist voices concerns
Msgr. Michel Schooyans, a noted Belgian political theorist, has expressed serious misgivings about the process of “globalization” as it is seen by the United Nations leadership.
Msgr. Schooyans, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences and consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family, offered his thoughts to a Vatican conference on globalization and the family. He suggested that in the eyes of UN officials, globalization means “a concentration of power that has the odor of totalitarianism.”
The UN, the Belgian professor observed, “thinks that the world in its entirety has more value than the person.” He added that according to this view—which he said is heavily influenced by New Age thinking—Christian humanism “has to be abandoned and rejected, in order to exalt a neo-pagan cult of Mother Earth.”
Msgr. Schooyans, who teaches at the Catholic University of Louvain, said that the “Earth Charter” currently being prepared by UN officials offers clear evidence to support his charges. In that document, he reported, the human race is depicted as “a part of a vast universe in the process of evolution,” and which is marked today by “an unprecedented growth in population that overtaxes economic and social systems.” The underlying philosophy of the Charter, he said, sees all religions—but particularly the Catholic faith—as obstacles to progress.
The UN, Msgr. Schooyans concluded, is now aiming to create a new world order over which a “supergovernment” would preside. “The Church will have no choice but to fight against such a form of globalization,” Msgr. Schooyans remarked. This powerful new government would suppress intermediate structures, and seek “more and more centralized control of information, knowledge, technology, human life, health, commerce, politics, and law.”
Back to Catholic World Report January 2001 Table of Contents