New UN development goals pit pro-family nations against the West

The United Nations (UN) member states passed a groundbreaking, 15-year plan for global development on Sunday evening, delivering both wins and loses for pro-life and pro-family supporters.

The new Sustainable Development Goals document is a comprehensive agreement on issues of poverty, education, environmental protection, and health—in many cases noncontroversial platforms. But negotiations over a few key words and phrases referencing abortion and sexual rights pitted developing countries, mostly African and Arab, against the United States, Canada, the European Union, and progressive Latin American countries.

In the end, the new agreement, titled “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” is a compromise. It contains problematic language on both abortion and gender, prompting 10 pro-family countries, including Nigeria, Qatar, and Honduras, to file official reservations when the goals were finalized last summer. The International Planned Parenthood Federation called it a “win for women and girls.” But the agreement does not include any new sexual rights or LGBT references, a victory for traditional family advocates and a frustration for pro-LGBT news sites.

The new goals will replace the Millennium Development Goals, passed by the UN in 2000 and set to expire at the end of this year. Like the Millennium goals, the new goals will inform and guide global foreign aid funding. This tie to aid is especially concerning to pro-life, pro-family developing nations that want to ensure foreign aid does not have strings attached to progressive reforms.

The road to Sunday evening began three years ago, at the Rio+20 conference in June 2012. That gathering of UN member states solidified each state’s commitment to creating new development goals for 2015. The resulting document, “The Future We Want,” defined the basic content and latitude of the new goals, and, because of strong opposition from key pro-family member states, did not include any reference to abortion or reproductive rights.

Last summer, the assembly debated and finalized the specific goals and targets contained in the new post-2015 agreement. When settled, the 17 goals and 169 targets included the first reference in a major development document to “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” commonly recognized as a reference to abortion rights. The language was qualified by a reference to the 1994 agreement at the International Conference on Population and Development, acknowledging abortion is a matter settled by national legislation. The UN can only advocate for abortion rights where countries have legalized abortion.

The goals also included language referencing “gender” as a protected class, instead of the more transparent term “sex.” Qatar issued a reservation, clarifying that “gender” only refers to “male” or “female,” aware that some countries see “gender” as alluding to “gender identity.” Elyssa Koren, United Nations counsel and director of United Nations advocacy for ADF International, said the process of finalizing the goals and targets was “strategically rushed” to get that language permanently included. Once finalized last summer, the goals and targets were not opened again for negotiation.

When negotiations over the preamble, declaration, means of implementation, and follow-up continued in January, pro-family countries successfully fought to remove problematic language and ambiguous references. Due to disagreement over how to identify the family—some advocating for “all families” or “various forms of the family”—a paragraph noting the role of family in development was entirely removed. Nonetheless, Koren credits the African and Arab states for keeping these sections clean and bringing the negotiations to a close on Sunday.

“Member states on our side started to become very active and very intent that controversial references didn’t make it into these sections,” she said.

The goals will be adopted officially at a world leader summit in September and take effect in January 2016. In March, the assembly will decide on the “indicators” countries will be required to report on, something Koren calls “potentially dangerous” if pro-family states don’t take an active role in ensuring the indicators do not push for required reporting on controversial measures, like abortion or sexual rights.