Austin Ruse at the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute released June 24 the following statement about the U.N. population meetings scheduled to take place in New York June 25–29:

Senior U.N. diplomatic sources report that Dr. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, pressured the heads of six Muslim delegations into a late-night meeting during the final Cairo+5 prepcom at the end of March.

In an apparent effort to split delegates and NGOs along religious lines, Sadik is said to have charged the Muslim diplomats with working closely with the Vatican delegation and Christian NGOs.

Apparently Sadik had grown alarmed at the increased lobbying presence of Christian NGOs, and suspected ongoing communication between them and Muslim delegations. Sadik's initiative was met with diplomatic anger.

This controversial meeting took place when it became obvious that Sadik was not getting all she wanted from the negotiations. On the one hand, Sadik wanted more funding from the west for population programs. On the other hand, she wanted more advanced reproductive rights language from the developing world. She got neither.

As a response to the great number of pro-life lobbyists at the Cairo+5 prepcom, it is also suspected that Sadik played a role in encouraging a number of radical feminist NGOs to apply for participation in this week's “intersessional” that is supposed the break the stalemate between the G-77 and the industrialized west. These NGOs were given special consideration to participate in this final prepcom and at the immediately following Special Session of the UN General Assembly on Population and Development. Almost all the groups are active in promoting abortion and in changing national laws relating to abortion.

Among the groups are Action Canada for Population and Development, National Abortion Rights Action League, National Abortion Federation, U.S. Committee for UNFPA, and the Wallace Global Fund.

Action Canada for Population and Development, founded with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, is an association begun by the Canadian arm of International Planned Parenthood Federation. In recent months, Action Canada ran a series of meetings meant to show support for the Cairo Program of Action. They did not allow pro-life participation.

National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Abortion Federation are among the most radical pro-abortion groups in the United States.

The U.S. Committee for UNFPA, charged with raising public support for UNFPA, has as its president the former director of the Margaret Sanger Center International which is named for the controversial American eugenicist much admired by the Nazis.

When these 24 NGOs were first mentioned for special treatment at the final Cairo+5 prepcom, developing world diplomats objected because of what they saw as increasingly discriminatory treatment by UNFPA against pro-family NGOs.

Diplomats also fear the same kind of intimidating tactics the radical feminists used in March.

One afternoon during those meetings, radical feminists formed a gaunt-let through which diplomats were forced to pass.