I know this from my experience of more than 20 years at the UN -- including working as an NGO delegate advising official delegates plus being an official U.S. delegate appointed by President George W. Bush to two sessions, The Children's Summit (2002) and the Commission on the Status of Women (2003).
I've learned that whatever the theme of the session and whether it's an official or NGO meeting. And this week, March 13 - March 24, the UN is holding its 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women.
A 2013 article that cited the 10 top accomplishments of the UN lists "promoting women's rights" as the UN's #1 accomplishment over the years. That achievement demonstrates the indirect and outsized influence of radical feminist NGOs in the United States and in other Member States. They gained significant, even decisive, power in 2010 with the establishment of a body incorporating all related UN agencies under one billion-dollar entity -- UN Women: United
Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. This powerful consolidation of women's agencies within the UN (often referred to as a "global policy-making body") gave radical women unprecedented global influence. UN Women is now among the most powerful of the various entities of the UN in working to impose radical policies and practices related to women's rights and gender identity. It is nothing short of the 21st Century's most glaring example of arrogant western colonialism: cultural imperialism and domination at its worst.
The establishment of UN Women was the result of significant groundwork to implement a long-term strategy. Ambassador Arvonne Fraser, former ambassador to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), explained the strategy very simply: "[W]hen you put something in law you change culture." UN treaties, of course, are not law, but "customary law" has become a direct implication of the treaties and economic benefits that are given or withheld by the UN according to a specific nation's adherence to the treaties. Thus, a series of women's meetings were planned to provide a foundation for cultural change, not just in the U.S. but around the world.
The UN's "International Women's Year" in 1975 was followed by "The United Nations Decade for Women" from 1976 to 1985 ,including a World Plan of Action and a dramatic increase in non-governmental leaders (NGO), with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). All of this happened following the drafting in 1972 of the controversial Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This proposed treaty is promoted by its proponents as a "women's rights treaty" (focusing on the "women's rights" agenda rather than the human rights of women).
Comment: Why not focus on human rights in general?
A more recent development is the UN's revolutionary way of defining women as "mother, worker and citizen," significantly leaving out "wife" as an important role of women, and implying that the role as "wife" is insignificant and unnecessary, even a handicap to women's well-being and economic security. The anti-wife theme has progressed to the point of "maternal bullying" -- a narrative trying to convince women that marriage means a man will control a women's life by violence and abuse, especially when she is pregnant. It also encompasses the idea of male irresponsibility and reinforces the idea that society discriminates against pregnant women. Marriage and children, then, are inherently limiting for women's potential and well-being.
Comment: It also leaves out fathers.
Thus, abortion is viewed as essential if women are to reach their potential and achieve well-being. My report researching women's well-being over the century 1900 to 2000, Graining Ground: A Profile of American Women in the Twentieth Century, tracked 7 dimensions of women's well-being and found the trends in demography, health, education, family, economics, attitude and religion tracked upward, indicating significant improvement across dimensions of well-being. "On the whole, women are healthier, we live longer and remain in better health into old age. We have more professional degrees, and we make more money. But, we are still burning out too often, and our freedom and independence has come at a high cost in terms of interconnectedness." In short, the biggest price women have paid is in the area of personal well-being, especially in terms of marriage and family.
Comment: Men have also paid a price.
These well-documented trends have been ignored, in part because of the influence of the progressive NGOs through their work at the U.N. From 1975 to 1995, there were four United Nations World Conferences on Women (Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing). It would be impossible to overstate the influence of the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) where a Platform for Action was embraced by First Lady Hillary Clinton who famously said in Beijing, "Women's Rights are Human Rights" and went back home to set up women's bureaus in every U.S. federal agency to further so-called "women's rights," including "political quotas and positive measures." The special interest agenda and bureaucratic bloating continues today.
During Beijing and the subsequent Beijing+ Conferences (Beijing 5, 10, 15 and 20), so-called "gender parity" and "gender mainstreaming" were major priorities and became a focus around the world through U.S. State Department and UN pressure and funding. I view this pressure on Member States as a form of cultural imperialism on a par with the worst excesses of the 18th and 19th centuries -- local cultural or religious traditions are trampled in the rush to superimpose Western values (particularly unlimited access to abortion and free contraceptives) on other nations and "socially construct" radical social views and values regarding "women's rights."
Next, the UN began linking feminism to economics and environmentalism by new goals to spread the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the more recent Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) -- both efforts had more emphasis on "women's rights" than on the economy and environment. Both efforts undermined traditional values and pushed an anti-life agenda, "demography, not destiny." Every new UN session brings fresh slogans like that, along with new tactics, and controversial messages in colorful and appealing packages, but the "new wine" comes from the same old "wineskins."
NGO leaders as well as delegates know that "words have consequences," so documents are carefully crafted using vague terms with generally understood definitions, but as those words are interpreted the meanings are expanded. As a result, cultures change. Inevitably, "reproductive rights" means abortion and "gender equity" and "gender mainstreaming" mean quotas. Words, then, become codes that can be interpreted as policy and thus "vehicles of transformation." Each succeeding world conference on women has caused an exponential increase in ways women's issues are taking on a life of their own around the world, "forcing governments" to respond. More significantly, this revolution increasingly has been viewed as hindered by "religious fundamentalism" that embodies "deep-seated prejudices" causing "discriminatory practices against women." Likewise, in the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple sources reported on Mrs. Clinton's remark that "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed" to ensure women's control over their "reproductive health care" (code for abortion and birth control).
Fortunately, conservative groups have frequently been successful in blocking the worst of the leftist agenda. Perhaps more importantly, conservatives have exposed the ways that the UN entities abuse their roles and bully poor third-world nations into conformity with their radical policies and programs by threatening to cut off aid. It is the conservative NGO leaders who have brought attention to the ways the UN has become an instrument of colonialism, exporting the worst of Western values in order to fundamentally transform other nations. These brave and valiant voices in the wilderness need to be heard and heeded by those with power and influence in the Member States before the smaller nations are forced to implement policies that are the pathway to demographic winter, so that they become as moribund as the declining homelands of western feminists.
* This article is based on a 10-page report just published in the international scholarly journal, The Natural Family.
Comment: Whether conservative or liberal, both sides have ideologies that contribute to the problem.