UNFPA Report Says Catholic Dissidents Help Advance 'Reproductive Rights"

A report issued on May 18 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides a strategy for undermining Catholic Church teaching on sexual morality and family life. The plan involves partnering with Catholic clergy and lay organizations that may secretly dissent from Church teaching. By choosing to work with such groups, UNFPA can appear to be in accord with the Church, even as it promotes such things as the legalization of abortion and the provision of contraceptives to adolescents.

The report, entitled "Working from Within: Culturally Sensitive Approaches in UNFPA Programming," is a 32-page examination of UNFPA's efforts in nine countries to change laws and establish what it calls reproductive rights and health - an ambiguous phrase that is used throughout the report and is never defined but in UN parlance includes abortion. In its section on Brazil readers are told that one lesson to emerge from UNFPA's work in the country was that the Catholic Church was not a monolith and that essential to fighting Church teaching was identifying dissenting Catholics. "Within the Catholic Church, certain progressive branches exist, including the Communidades Eclesiais de Base, whose Catholic clergy understand the harsh realities of the country's poor and are ardent advocates on their behalf."

In the report, UNFPA touts a collaboration it began in the early 1990s with Pastoral da Crianca, a Catholic nongovernmental organization that promotes maternal and infant health through a network of 150,000 volunteers. Both groups sought to promote the spacing of pregnancies, though Pastoral did so by teaching Church approved natural family planning, while UNFPA promoted contraception. The report calls the strategy "selective collaboration" with the Catholic Church, which it defines as "identifying and working together in those areas where objectives coincide, while respecting the boundaries inherent in each partner's mandate."

But it becomes clear that in reality UNFPA does not respect such boundaries. The case study reveals that UNFPA, with UNICEF, funded a radio program sponsored by Pastoral as well as other "materials dealing with various aspects of family planning." The report brags that "although the emphasis was on birth spacing through natural methods, modern methods of contraception were also introduced. Pastoral da Crianca provided all of this information to their volunteers, who, in turn, conveyed it to their clients during home visits."

Besides using Pastoral's vast volunteer network to help spread its message, UNFPA benefited from the relationship in another significant way: It gave them credibility. "For UNFPA, working with Pastoral lent a certain legitimacy to its efforts and facilitated its involvement with grass-roots communities." Following the visit of Pope John Paul II to Brazil during the Jubilee Year of 2000, Pastoral terminated its relationship with UNFPA.

Copyright - C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute). Permission
granted for unlimited use. Credit required.

Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute
866 United Nations Plaza, Suite 427
New York, New York 10017
Phone: (212) 754-5948 Fax: (212) 754-9291
E-mail: c-fam@c-fam.org Website: www.c-fam.org