UN Hides Another Decline

Here’s the question: On the heels of Climategate, will the media overlook an effort by the United Nations to hide yet another decline, also aided and abetted by academia? “At a meeting on maternal and child health research in Washington last week, United Nations (UN) staff and abortion advocates told scientists they should ‘harmonize’ their findings or discuss them ‘in a locked room’ so that the press could not report maternal death numbers that conflicted with the ones they use to lobby policy makers and major international donors,” Susan Yoshihara reported in a dispatch for the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM).  “Ann Starrs, co-founder and president of the abortion advocacy organization Family Care International (FCI), told a roomful of scientists to ‘lock all the academics in a black box and have them come out with a consensus set of numbers’ or ‘at least hide that there is disagreement’ and ‘infighting.’”

“FCI is the founder of Women Deliver, which is hosting a massive UN-backed reproductive rights fundraising conference in Washington next week.” Catherine Foster co-authored the report for C-FAM.

“The comments were made at a symposium hosted by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the British medical journal, The Lancet,” Yoshihara and Foster report. “The journal recently published an IHME study, which refuted the UN-sanctioned but highly controversial figure of 500,000 annual maternal deaths, finding the number to have declined to 342,900 including 60,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS.”

“Abortion advocates and some UN staff have been using the higher figure for two decades to promote a version of maternal and child health policy that includes abortion.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.