If it’s Halloween, it must be the annual UNICEF fund-raising effort, in which American children go door to door asking for financial support for an organization that devoutly wishes there were fewer of them. Many of us old fogies remember UNICEF from our own efforts on its behalf when we were kids, when it was about improving the lot of children, especially in the impoverished regions of the world. Now, what it is all too often about is abortion and population control. Lifesite offers a timely reminder that this is not an organization Christians should be supporting:
Halloween is here again, and with it the fundraising drive for UNICEF the so-called children’s fund of the United Nations which has been mired in abortion support for the last twenty years. The organization has not learned from its past and continues to engage in the anti-life agenda. Earlier this month UNICEF joined Planned Parenthood International and the UN’s population control arm UNFPA in sponsoring a women’s conference, one thirds of which was dedicated to promoting abortion. [See here for news story.]
UNICEF has been implicated in population control and “family planning” measures for many years as thoroughly documented in Winnifred Prestwich’s 1993 pamphlet UNICEF Guilty as charged. The organization descended even further in 1995 when Carol Bellamy, a radical pro-abortion activist, became the executive director of the organization, a post she held till April 2005. From her elevated position, Bellamy turned UNICEF into a more direct force behind the promotion of abortion and abortifacient contraceptives working hand in hand with the notorious UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in such activities. (See LifeSiteNews.com’s archive on such UNICEF activities here.)
The change in focus at UNICEF quickly became apparent causing the Vatican’s UN Mission to issue a press release in 1996 noting that it was withdrawing its symbolic donation of support to UNICEF. The release noted that UNICEF had “begun to divert some of its already scarce economic and human resources from the care of the most basic needs of children” to abortion supporting activities (see the Vatican release here).
While UNICEF still does some good around the world, and has changed some under director Anne Veneman (who has reversed some of the far-left policies of her predeccessor, Carol Bellamy, under whom UNICEF started its abortion and population control advocacy, as well as supporting Palestinian summer camps that taught children about the glories of suicide bombing, among other unsavory activities), it still has a long way to go before it should be back in the good graces of anyone who cares about children yet to be born. Remember that as you answer your door this evening.
