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...But There Is No Peace
The Nobel Prize Committee has bestowed its highest honor
on an organization that promotes the “culture of death.”

By John-Henry Westen

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give it to you.” (Jn 14:27)

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the slogan that appears occasionally on signs carried at pro-life demonstrations takes on added significance: “Peace in the World, Peace in the Womb.” That slogan recalls Mother Teresa’s famous statement: “The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.”

In 1994, Mother Teresa explained that statement in an address to the US Congress. Abortion destroys peace, she said:

. . . because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

Pope John Paul II has expressed similar thoughts. In his message for the observance of the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2001, the Pope reminded the world that “there can be no peace” as long as offenses such as abortion are prevalent. “Human life cannot be seen as an object to do with as we please,” he said. “It is not possible to invoke peace and despise life.”

Such a definition of true peace was evidently far from the minds of the members of the Nobel Prize Committee when they selected this year’s recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. The coveted prize was awarded on October 12 to the United Nations and its Secretary General Kofi Annan. The $1-million cash grant that comes with the Peace Prize is in a sense only symbolic; the real prize is the international prestige associated with the award.

The divisions of the Nobel Prize Committee, however, have for years been tainted by a leftward political bias. No doubt the fact that the committee is made up of five members appointed by the Norwegian Parliament—mostly left-of-center politicians—has something to do with the liberal predominance among prize recipients. The net effect of this bias—which affects the Nobel Prize selections in all categories, not just the Peace Prize—was made evident in February 2001, when 80 American Nobel laureates, selected from different fields, signed a letter to President George W. Bush urging him to continue the Clinton-sanctioned federal funding of destructive embryonic stem-cell research.

Pope John Paul himself was one of the 136 candidates nominated for this year’s Peace Prize. But any expectation that he might actually win the award was dismissed when a member of the selection committee openly maligned both the Pontiff and the Catholic faith. “The current Roman Catholic theology is one that favors death rather than life,” said Lutheran Bishop Gunnar Staalsett, in an outburst against Catholic opposition to the distribution of condoms. “Religious leaders must be outspoken,” he added. “Condom use should be tolerated as a way to stop the spread of AIDS.”

Kofi Annan’s record
The success of UN peacekeeping efforts, and of Kofi Annan’s own performance as an international mediator, might be open to question. But in terms of “peace in the womb,” the records of both the organization and its leader are intolerable. Yet few people recognize the extent of the UN’s involvement in the promotion of abortion. And Annan’s personal dealings on the subject are virtually unknown.

In a telegram of congratulations after the announcement of the award, Pope John Paul told Annan, “In your case, the Nobel Prize crowns a life dedicated to the service of peace and justice, and the well-being of the peoples of the world.” Yet it was possible to read a note of gentle reproof in the Pope’s suggestion that the UN needed “to respond with increasing effectiveness to the difficult challenges that arise in a world marked by apparently insurmountable imbalances, tensions, and the lack of respect for human rights.”

The fundamental conflict between the vision of Pope John Paul and that of Kofi Annan lies, of course, in the definition of “human rights.” As head of the UN, Annan has appointed a cadre of radical feminists to head up various departments at the world organization—evidently in the belief that their support for “reproductive health” and “gender equality” will advance the cause of human rights.

The UN leader has been more explicit in his support for the UN’s efforts to promote family planning. As recently as July, in an address for World Population Day, he called for “an integrated approach to slowing population growth.” Annan cited the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development to justify his endorsement of population control, saying that efforts to curb fertility were essential to the reduction of poverty and the protection of the environment. He said, “Among the requirements for achieving these related goals are universal access to reproductive health care and family planning.” In a thinly veiled reference to national laws restricting abortion, Annan lamented that women “are often denied the right to . . . control their own fertility.” He added: “Enhancing women’s opportunities enables them to make informed choices about family size—and to break the vicious cycle of poverty and environmental degradation.”

[In his enthusiastic support for population-control efforts, and his insistence that such efforts are essential to the elimination of poverty, Annan has given his backing to one agency under his purview, while contradicting the findings of another UN organ.

In December 2000, at a farewell event for Nafis Sadik, then outgoing head of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Annan praised Sadik lavishly for her untiring promotion of population control. “You have done more than anyone to bring about a radical change in the way the world sees population issues,” he said. “You have ensured that they are no longer seen in isolation, but as integral to all development efforts.” Then, in a particularly revealing comment Annan lauded Sadik’s “willingness to brave the wrath, if not of the Almighty himself, then certainly of those who claim to speak for him here on earth.” He ended by proclaiming the triumph of the population-control ideology: “And what is more, you have won your point.”

Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition Canada, pointed out at the time that Annan’s remark seemed to imply that in some way the UN leader realizes his organization is fighting against God—or, at a minimum, against organized religion—in its promotion of the population-control agenda. “The UN knows that it’s doing the devil’s work and is proud of it,” Hughes charged.

The UNFPA crusade
The population-control efforts of the UNFPA have become legendary. UNFPA officials have sent “reproductive health kits”—including abortifacients, and vacuum aspirators that can be used for abortions—to refugee camps in the wake of wars and natural disasters. UNFPA spokesmen have lent their support to the notorious “one-child” family-planning program in China, in spite of widespread accusations of human-right abuses. In the most recent display of this aggressive approach, the UNFPA responded to devastating earthquakes in El Salvador earlier this year by sending the same “reproductive health” kits. Julia Cardenal, president of the Salvadoran pro-life group Si A La Vida, reacted angrily to that UN program, saying, “We had two major earthquakes in El Salvador in January and February of this year, and instead of sending us food or medicine, or something to meet our needs, they sent a range of contraception devices.”

The UNFPA has unabashedly acted as apologist for the one-child program in China—even after Amnesty International (a group that is not associated with the pro-life movement) found that the Chinese family-planning program involves forced abortion, forced sterilization, infanticide, and torture. UNFPA asserts that China’s family planning efforts, especially in communities where UNFPA is involved, is completely voluntary. However, a September investigation by the Population Research Institute found that even in small towns where UNFPA operates, numerous women have come forward to testify that they had been brutally forced into compliance with the one-child regimen.

UNFPA officials have not only failed to condemn Beijing’s human-rights violations; they have even held the Chinese policy up as a model for emulation. In an April 1991 interview with Xinhua (China’s official news agency) Nafis Sadik, who was executive director of UNFPA until the end of 2000, said:

China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past 10 years. Now the country could offer its experiences and special experts to help other countries.

After years of being guided by the UN’s zealous promotion of family-planning policies, some Third World countries are beginning to recognize the devastating effects of those efforts. In June, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake of Sri Lanka observed with dismay that depopulation—the result of programs promoted and subsidized by the UNFPA—had left his country unable to man its armed forces and staff its religious shrines. Wickremanayake is now proposing a scheme to boost the country’s population, by providing “baby bonuses” for families with more than two children, in a radical break from the policies set by the Sri Lankan government since the 1970s.

However, the UNFPA is not the only agency of the world organization that has been involved in the promotion of abortion. As reported elsewhere in this issue of CWR [see World Watch], the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights has essentially forced the government of Nepal to legalize abortion; the Human Rights Committee had made similar demands on Nicaragua and Guatemala; the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has criticized Andorra for not allowing abortions in that tiny (and overwhelmingly Catholic) European land.

Abortion promotion is so pervasive in the United Nations that even the arm of the organization devoted specifically to children targets the unborn child for destruction. Although the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was founded (in 1946) to help starving children after the destruction of World War II, it has in recent years teamed up with UNFPA and other UN agencies in promoting confidential abortion services—along with contraception and sex education—for children as young as 10 years old. For these reasons the Vatican cut off its symbolic contribution to UNICEF in 1996.

Despite the fact that the preamble to the Convention of the Rights of the Child includes the statement, “The promotion and protection of the right to life as well as the human dignity and rights of the child, before as well as after birth” [emphasis added], the document too has been cited in the campaign to promote legal abortion. At a preparatory meeting for the UN World Summit on Children this year, a Canadian delegate caused a stir when she openly stated what UN activists had previously only hinted: that the “reproductive health services” to be guaranteed for the girl child “include abortion.”

The UN and the new world order
The vision of world peace that guides UN activities is very different from the vision articulated by Mother Teresa and John Paul II; it is a vision that revolves around the establishment of a “new world order.” More than a mere political and legal reorganization of the world with the UN as focus, the UN’s concept of a “new world order” involves a reorientation of thought, in which population control plays a key role in the welfare of the Earth’s citizens. In a September interview with the Italian newspaper Avennire, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, observed that this conception of a new world order is “a real and proper philosophy of the new man and new world”—and one likely to clash repeatedly with the Christian understanding.

Cardinal Ratzinger explained that the philosophy of the “new world order” does not fall into the trap that snares many idealists—the “hope that men, accustomed to wealth and well-being, will be disposed to make the necessary sacrifices to attain general welfare.” Instead the new philosophy gives individuals the chance to secure their own welfare by limiting the opportunities of others; it “proposes strategies to reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness they have attained will not be affected.” The new philosophy, said the cardinal, is far from utopian, but “very realistic, inasmuch as it sets limits to the means available” for rising up the socio-economic ladder. In fact, this new utilitarian approach allows those who embrace it to avoid the knotty problems posed by poverty and human need—”not being concerned with the care of those who are no longer productive or who can no longer hope for a determined quality of life.”

Significantly, the new ideology aims to empower women—but, as Cardinal Ratzinger noted, that effort takes a very specific form. The exponents of the “new world order” promise to help women reach personal fulfillment. “However, the principal obstacles to her fulfillment are the family and maternity,” the cardinal commented. “Today there is no longer a ‘philosophy of love,’ but only a ‘philosophy of selfishness.’”

In his Avvenire interview, Cardinal Ratzinger concluded that Christians have a duty to fight against the acceptance of this new philosophy. “At this stage of the development of the new image of the new world,” he said, “Christians—not just Christians, but they more than others—have the duty to protest.”

Day of peace?
In the press release announcing Annan and the UN as the recipients of this year’s Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee said the award was given in recognition “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.” The committee went on to proclaim that “the only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by way of the United Nations.”

“When people say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them,” the Bible warns us (1 Thes 5:3). Long before the fateful day of the terrorist attack in New York and Washington, the United Nations had declared September 11, 2001 as the “International Day of Peace.”

John-Henry Westen is the editor of LifeSite News (www.lifesite.net), an Internet news daily affiliated with Canada’s pro-life, pro-family newspaper The Interim.

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