A Reply to Susan’s Response

Thanks to Susan for her response to my posting on the MDGs.

She acknowledges that the 2007 report (the most recent on the MDGs) that I cited as an example, not as the only evidence supporting my claim (Susan at the outset states “based on the evidence he cites”) addresses “reducing unwanted pregnancies.” But it appears that she thinks that the only text I cited is all there is upon which I base my claims. Let me be clear that I cited this 2007 report as an example, not as the only evidence supporting my conclusions about what has happened to the MDGs. Let us all be clear on another important point: my critique is not of the MDGs, it is what is happening to them. As I concluded in my post, “there is time for interested parties and persons to realize what is happening and to lend a hand to get the MDGs back on track.” I cannot see how anyone would contend that, based on what I previously said, my critique was of the MDGs themselves. My concern is what is happening to them, and I stand by the position taken in my earlier post. My concern, moreover, is based on what I have witnessed personally in the halls of the UN when issues involving the MDGs or related to MDG goals have been discussed.

I have about seven years worth of reports and other UN documentation that substantiates my claim about the MDGs in particular. Moreover, I have the personal experience of being present as a negotiator in the General Assembly, the ECOSOC, the Third Committee, the Sixth Committee, the Preparatory Committee for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, the Preparatory Commission for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Commission for Social Development, the Commission on Sustainable Development, the Commission on Population and Development, and the Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities over the past decade. Many of these meetings have addressed implementation of the MDG goals. Other meetings preceded the Millennium Declaration but addressed matters subsequently addressed by the MDGs.

The Millennium Declaration was adopted in September of 2000 as I mentioned in my previous post. After its adoption, many delegations wanted to emphasize what is needed to combat “maternal mortality” is basic health care, including pre- and post-natal care for mother and child. However, these efforts have been met with persistent lobbying to address instead “reproductive health” issues (often a coded phrase encompassing abortion access, population control, and the facilitation of sexual promiscuity outside of marriage). The reports and other documents of the United Nations Population Fund are but one source of this problematic phenomenon. But there are others. The 2007 report that I cited as an example, not as exclusive evidence, is a tiny portion of the tip of a menacing iceberg. I wish the iceberg did not exist so that the noble goals of the Millennium Declaration designed to help all the poor of the world can be achieved in a timely way. But the iceberg does exist, and I have seen its distressing presence too many times.

The report to which I referred is one of the latest products of UN activity which carries the world further away from tackling head on the basic health concerns of the poor amongst our sisters and brothers—especially that dealing with expecting mothers and their children in utero.

I’ll conclude this posting with the candid assessment (that reflects some of my concerns) made at the Summit of the Heads of State and Government During the 60^th General Assembly (September 2005), which allocated a good deal of time addressing the progress toward achieving the MDGs, by Angelo Cardinal Sodano, then the Vatican Secretary of State:

To a world already exposed to pandemics, while others are at risk of breaking out, to the millions without access to basic health care, medicine and drinking water, we cannot offer an ambiguous, reductive or even ideological vision of health. For example, would it not be better to speak clearly of the “health of women and children” [as the MDGs do] instead of using the term “reproductive health”? Could there be a desire to return to the language of a “right to abortion”?

RJA sj