UN agencies want to censor pro-life speech

(C-Fam) — Digital platforms should be held accountable for allowing misinformation on abortion. These agencies working in tandem say pro-life speech is tantamount to “misinformation” and should be stopped.

The UN’s human reproduction program (HRP), housed in the World Health Organization (WHO), recently published the first of a series of papers examining the impact of abortion “misinformation” as it relates to human rights.  Their analysis requires their own idiosyncratic understanding of both misinformation and human rights.

For instance, they accept without caveat that abortion access is a right as part of “sexual and reproductive health and rights”, a term never defined or adopted in any international negotiated outcome.

The paper also cites independent experts and committees as sources of human rights standards. Such experts and committees offer recommendations and opinions on human rights treaties, though they have no authority to create new human rights apart from the plain language of the various human rights treaties.

At the same time, the article makes no mention of the consensus position of the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) that the legal status of abortion is solely for individual governments to determine.

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The authors define misinformation as “false, inaccurate, or misleading information shared without intent to deceive,” while disinformation is spread with knowledge and intent to deceive, and “a particularly harmful form of misinformation, with the potential to deliberately erode human rights protections and restrict access to evidence-based care.”

As an example, the authors cite an article claiming that “inaccurate beliefs about fetal pain were linked with antiabortion views, shaping attitudes toward access and policy.” However, the article they cite bases its view of when unborn children can first feel pain on a “current medical consensus” that simply does not exist, while labeling survey participants who support abortion restrictions based...

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