UN This Week Dec 4-7
UN Agencies
The United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP28) gathered policy leaders and climate activists in Dubai to evaluate compliance with international climate agreements.
On the 4th of December, a day referred to as the COP Gender Day, abortion and climate advocates shared the stage to discuss the “undeniable” link between abortion access and a healthy environment. Heather McMullen, Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, said:
“The climate crisis is a crisis of bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health (SRHR) is our cornerstone of climate justice. As the crisis increases, it takes advantage of rising inequalities and empowers imbalances in society.”
McMullen tried to distance herself from the narrative that women need to have fewer children to save the environment and referred to this agenda as problematic for instrumentalizing women’s bodies. This is a step in the right direction, yet, she also referred to climate change as a valid reason why people “do not feel safe enough to make the vulnerable decision to have a family.”
This argument has two faulty underlying assumptions. First, it presupposes that what makes people “unsafe” is the actual climate, not the fear-mongering messaging that most climate activists promote. See some examples of panic-instigating quotes from this very conference below:
“We are no longer talking about global warming but global burning”
- Dr. Smukeliso Dube FP2030
“This ecological meltdown is driven by an economic system under which the drivers of climate change, environmental degradation, and gender and social inequality are interconnected.”
Second, their argument also presupposes that the right to decide whether one wants a family or not is granted even after a baby in the womb has been conceived. Abortion activists fail to recognize the moral confusion and continue to push for abortion as part of the women’s liberation movement which, to them, goes hand in hand with climate advocacy.
“Climate justice is inherently feminist because it is rooted in the principles of intersectionality and anti-patriarchal collective organizing”
Lipi Rahman, a COP28 panelist who worked with various women-focused NGOs in Bangladesh, shared a tragic story of a woman who conceived a baby and was pressured by her partner to get an abortion. The woman got an abortion pill from a pharmacy and died.
According to the panelist, the moral of the story was that the pregnant woman should have had access to a safe abortion. However, this line of reasoning seems to ignore that it is her partner who pressured her to kill the baby. The proper solution to such a troubling story would be to invest in services that help women during unplanned pregnancies, especially when their partner is unsupportive, not to give into threats and pressure from the domestic partner and kill an innocent life.
The COP28 talks on climate change and abortion were full of big words and confusing quotes. See an example below:
“Oftentimes what is missing is a discussion on the impacts of [climate change] on SRHR. They vary, they are multiple, they’re complex, and they take hold in different ways in different places”
Such quotes might sound inspiring to some, yet this is how I felt after watching 4 hours of COP28 programming on abortion:
Other News
In partnership with C-Fam, The Permanent Mission of Belarus to the UN, held a movie screening at the UN discussing the role of sex buying in human trafficking. The event featured the latest work of Benjamin Nolot, President and CEO of Exodus Cry, a prominent anti-trafficking activist and filmmaker. The acclaimed film “Buying Her” analyzes the real-life stories of sex buyers and victims of sex trafficking to help policymakers decide on the best course to reduce and eventually eliminate the kind of demand for sex that leads to sex trafficking. See an excerpt from the statement delivered by Helen Taylor (Exodus Cry) below:
Pro-abortion groups, including Ipas, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and IPPF issued a joint statement on the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) expressing “concern” for the activity of pro-life groups at the UN:
“We note with concern the increased presence and mobilization of anti-rights actors and organizations at the UN, co-opting human rights language to gain legitimacy and instrumentalizing the UDHR through a narrow and regressive lens to the detriment of historically and structurally marginalized groups that require the most protection from the human rights system”
