Pro-Life International

Sidelined for decades, right-wing religious groups are now more active than ever in lobbying the United Nations against contraception, sex education, and other ‘anti-family’ programs. They’re building international coalitions which could cripple future UN efforts on women’s rights, population control, gay rights, and other global policy issues.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


That call to action went out in September from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), one of several groups that are becoming increasingly active in promoting their agenda — a global version of traditional family values — at the United Nations. UN conferences on women’s issues have been the near-exclusive domain of progressives, but recent years have seen a surge of lobbying by religious conservative groups — lobbying that could affect the UN’s stance on issues from contraception to sex education to gay rights.

UN conferences have addressed questions of women’s roles and population growth since the mid-1970s, but until the late 1990s, religious conservatives largely sat out the conversation, dismissing the world body as irrelevant to their goals.

But that changed with the end of the Cold War, which freed up the UN to put more energy into areas such as women’s issues. Several recent high-profile UN conferences, notably the 1994 population conference in Cairo and the 1995 women’s conference in Beijing, alarmed conservatives.

The Pope himself condemned what he declared to be promotion of contraception and abortion at the population conference in Cairo, and called on people of faith to get involved in forming UN policy. Richard Wilkins, managing director of the World Family Policy Center, attended his first UN meeting in 1996 and says he was startled at what he found. “I saw some very important political issues and very important policy issues being debated by the narrowest range of political viewpoints that I’d ever seen in my professional career,” says Wilkins. In response, he began organizing conservatives to lobby the UN on family issues.

Concerned religious conservatives founded both C-FAM and Wilkins’ WFPC in 1997. The first World Congress of Families, a more-or-less biannual meeting of socially conservative organizations held by the Howard Center, took place the same year. At the second congress in 1999, speakers included the widow of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat and Vatican aide Cardinal Lopez Trujillo. The congress aims to unite religious conservatives of many faiths around shared goals, including opposition to gay rights and abortion, and recognition of the nuclear family — a married man and woman, and their children — as the fundamental social unit.

This activism culminated in an unprecedented showing of several hundred religious conservatives at meetings leading up to Beijing+5, a conference held earlier this year to review progress on goals set at the 1995 conference. At the unusually contentious meetings, pressure from conservative groups helped defeat attempts to add protections for gay rights to the outcome document — the “stinging defeat” that C-FAM cited in its recruiting letter.

C-FAM is already rallying the troops to appear at an upcoming UN conference being held to review progress since the 1990 World Summit for Children. Conservatives aim to swing the discussion on HIV prevention among teenagers away from practices like condom distribution and sex education and toward abstinence.

While many of the UN’s decisions in this arena have already been made, the consensus-centered nature of the UN decision-making process makes its formation of new policies uniquely vulnerable to disruption by a small coalition of like-minded member states.

Recognizing this, conservatives are taking a pragmatic approach: C-FAM President Austin Ruse has declared his goal is not to convince the majority, but to organize 12 nations (which he declines to name) whose domestic policies are in sync with those of religious conservatives into a “permanent United Nations pro-family bloc.” Among 189 member states, 12 won’t win a vote, but can block consensus.

A vocal conservative presence can also make it easier for governments looking for a way out of commitments they’ve already made, says Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University and a veteran of UN conferences. The UN’s policies “are only going to be fulfilled if governments and international institutions continue to feel pressure from people to fulfill them,” she says.

It’s too early to tell just how much clout the religious groups will gain, but progressives are watching nervously. If George W. Bush wins the presidency, the conservatives’ efforts may get a boost, perhaps even in the form of support from the official US delegation, says Jennifer Butler, associate director of the progressive Presbyterian United Nations Office. “This is an emerging dynamic and it may fade,” she says. “Or it may grow into a major movement that we have to fight.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate