Pro-life work at United Nations is an uphill battle, speaker says

By Mary Ann Garber

SAINT MARY-OF-THE-WOODS—In 1945, the United Nations Charter was created to promote world peace and good will between countries.

Today, “abortion is a fight on the global level,” pro-life lobbyist Raimundo Rojas explained during a Jan. 26 speech, and population control amendments to the U.N. Charter are “anti-family and anti-life.”

During his keynote address for the Wabash Valley Right to Life fundraiser, Rojas discussed his work with Latin American delegations at the United Nations as a lobbyist for the International Right to Life organization since 1993.

A native of Cuba, Rojas also has served the National Right to Life organization as director of Hispanic outreach since 1991.

Six decades after its founding, Rojas said, the United Nations is involved in international regulations governing health, commerce, technology and other areas that affect “every single aspect of your life, whether you know it or not.”

The United Nations is made up of hundreds of committees and subcommittees that include the Commission on the Status of Women and the Commission on Population and Development with its Fund for Population Assistance, which he said promote abortion under the labels of reproductive rights and family planning.

“You need to understand the environment that we’re in right now,” Rojas explained. “The president of the United States is the single most pro-abortion president that we have ever had. … He still believes that supplying neonatal care to a child who has survived an abortion impedes on a woman’s right to choose. … He appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, … who has gone on record and testified in front of Congress that abortion should be a fundamental human right worldwide just like water and the ability to vote.”

U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations also support abortion as a human right, he said, and American pro-life lobbyists at the U.N. “have the unenviable task of having to fight against [anti-life policies of] our own country.”

There are only about five pro-life nongovernmental agency lobbyists at the United Nations, Rojas said, compared to “hundreds of pro-abortion NGOs” that lobby country representatives.

Pro-life lobbyists “pray a lot at the U.N. and we get laughed at,” he said. “… That’s all we’ve got at some points. So we just pray. We get in a corner and we pray.

“It’s important that everyone is aware of what happens at the U.N.,” Rojas said, “and that we do have pro-life people at the United Nations fighting for the rights of the unborn.”

After the program, Terre Haute attorney James Bopp Jr. said “2012 is really a critical year” for the pro-life movement.

Bopp has served as a general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee Inc. since 1978.

“We’re at a fork in the road as far as our country is concerned,” Bopp said, “and we have decisions to make this year on our elections. We’re either going to go further into a 100 percent pro-abortion government or we’re going to turn away from that. Thinking about the right to life movement and protecting the unborn are very important.”

Msgr. Lawrence Moran, a retired diocesan priest who lives in Terre Haute, said after the program that “abortion is an unspeakable crime. … We each have to stand tall and speak out and pray and work. Together, we can stop the horrible bloodshed of killing the unborn in our country by legalized abortion.”

After nearly 40 years, Msgr. Moran said, “it still stuns me that the Supreme Court of the United States could say that a civilized country can kill unborn children.” †