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The Family Under Attack
Today
social, political, economic, and other forces are threatening
the family, the basic unit of society. Yet many of the very
international agencies that are supposed to care for the welfare
of humanity seem hell-bent on destroying the family. Many
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly Muslim and
Christian organizations, are fighting back. The battle goes on.
NGOs
worldwide have been meeting in 2004, the tenth anniversary of
the first International Year of the Family. Many controversial
proposals to alter family life were seriously discussed in 1994
and are still hotly debated. Many of the issues important to the
family will be debated next year at a huge UN conference that is
commonly known as Beijing +10. Pro-family NGOs have been
exchanging information, evaluating current trends, offering
solutions, and devising platforms and strategies for that
conference.
What
Is Beijing +10?
In
1995 the UN Commission
on the Status of Women (CSW) held its Fourth
World Conference on Women in Beijing. The General
Assembly of the United Nations mandated the commission to
regularly review the critical areas of concern for the Platform
for Action. The second such review, Beijing
+10, will be held at the Forty-Ninth Session of
the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN Headquarters in
New York, February 28 – March 11, 2005. NGOs that have Special
Consultative Status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) are invited to participate. More than 1,000 NGOs took
part in the 48th session of CSW, which was a preparatory session
for Beijing +10, in March 2004.
What
Are the Issues?
“I
work with teenagers who ... don’t know what sex they
are, so we want the word gender to remain.” |
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The
Universal
Declaration of Human Rights declares that “the
family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and
is entitled to protection by society and the state” (Article
16[3]). Yet for many years UN agencies have been promoting
policies that threaten the family.
The
United Nations says it is trying to eradicate poverty,
illiteracy, and disease. But the means it proposes include
providing abortion on demand for all women (including
adolescents), and encouraging women to work outside the home,
with their children left in government-sponsored day care. The
platform of Beijing promotes radical feminism and support for
homosexual rights, and sees religion as an obstacle because it
promotes motherhood, family, and marriage.
Beijing
deals with women as entities outside the context of the family
and their roles as wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters. This
and other conferences ignore cultural and religious differences
and try to mandate one solution for everyone—even when all
societies do not have the same problems.
Sexual
and reproductive health services is widely interpreted
and implemented by UN agencies to mean abortion. |
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Much
of the language of the conference documents is vague but is
later interpreted the way the United Nations wants. Gender,
for example, appears repeatedly in these documents. In UN-speak,
it is not the same as biological sex: “Gender refers to the
economic, social and cultural attributes and opportunities
associated with being male or female in a particular point in
time (World
Health Organization: “Gender and Reproductive Rights”)
This
particular term is of special concern because many other
languages do not have two different terms for gender and sex,
and advocates of the term gender will use doublespeak.
When pressed for a definition, they say that gender and sex
are really the same thing. But when asked to use the term sex
in the document, they refuse.
In
fact, gender appears to be a thinly-disguised term for
sexual orientation. This same word was debated at the Third
Preparatory Session for the General Assembly Special Session on
Children (June 2001). One member of the Child Rights Caucus,
which was behind the most controversial articles in the outcome
document, was heard to say, “I work with teenagers who are
homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual. They don’t know what
sex they are, so we want the word gender to remain [in
the outcome document].”
Gender
equality aims to give men and
women completely equal—rather than equitable—rights and
responsibilities. If men and women were equal in this way, women
would not have the right to maintenance and support, and they
would inherit equal shares with men. Both of these contradict
Islamic Shari`ah and women’s natural biological roles as
mothers.
The
UN’s various agencies and conferences also call for sexual and
reproductive health services to be available to all, including
adolescents. This latter term, occurring in the outcome document
of the 1994 International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)
and subsequent UN documents, is widely interpreted and
implemented by various UN agencies— including UNICEF (United
Nations Children’s Fund) and UNFPA (United Nations Fund for
Population Activities)—to mean abortion.
While
the declarations of such conferences are not legally binding on
signatory countries, the declarations do shape national policies
and budgets.
*
Ælfwine
Mischler is an editor at IslamOnline.net. She represented the
International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child at a UN
conference in June 2001.
Note:
The hyperlinks in this article were last accessed Sept. 25, 2004.
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