Our report on UNICEF's involvement with abortion caused quite a stir. Officials from the United Nations’ fund for children's programs have called, visited, faxed and e-mailed us trying to convince us that the story was wrong.

We welcome that dialogue and hope to meet with UNICEF officials in New York to get to the bottom of some of the questions we raised.

But we stand by our report. We quoted UNICEF's stated goals and practices, and included UNICEF's answers to each charge.

We hope that the result of this discussion will be a new direction at UNICEF. Because, the truth is, UNICEF does a lot of praiseworthy work. In many ways, it is worthy of imitation, not just criticism. It is — easy to talk about serving the poor. UNICEF workers in the field save lives in poor communities every day.

However, if UNICEF is promoting abortion — and we believe it is — then the organization is destroying its good name.

The destruction caused by abortion is hard to exaggerate. It kills children, and since it kills children, it can destroy their mothers, as well. Women who have had abortions suffer decades of depression and anxiety that strangle the joy from their lives.

Abortion also wrecks cultures. After all, in order to accept abortion, a culture must change many things. It has to learn to live a lie by denying the death and pain abortion causes. It has to accept that convenience sometimes trumps mortality. It has to decide that the sexual appetites of men need to be satisfied without the natural check that women's fertility usually puts on it.

And watch what happens to the economy after abortion takes hold in a culture. As examples from Sweden to Japan teach us, abortion cultures are demographic time bombs. Working-age populations that embrace abortion raise their standard of living for a time, but they soon become senior-age populations that don't have an adequate working class to support them.

A new report by the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) finds much to praise in UNICEF, but it also finds lots of evidence of UNICEF's support for population control and abortion.

Here are some of its findings: E In the U.N. Population Fund's 1996 Inventory of Population Projects in Developing Countries Around the World, UNICEF is named as a financial contributor to a “global” program on reproductive health run by the Population Council and committed to “improving the quality of care in family planning and reproductive health services.” E UNICEF funds a South African organization called loveLife . As of January 2003, loveLife provided children with abortion service phone numbers and said: “You're pregnant, or you've just heard that your girlfriend is. You didn't plan it, you don't want it … Remember, it is your right to get counseling. It is your right to get an abortion. If people are unhelpful, don't get discouraged. Keep trying. You don't need permission from anybody to have an abortion.”

E C-Fam quotes an international abortion agency called Ipas, which claimed that “MVA instruments are also available through the UNICEF Warehouse Catalog. … Ipas is working to ensure that where medical abortion is offered, MVA is available as an alternative and/or backup method because of the safety and efficacy of the vacuum aspiration technology.” C-Fam says that Ipas stopped making the claim when C-Fam first reported on it.

Find these and other claims about UNICEF's practices in a report at www.c-fam.org. Our news report detailing other evidence is at www.ncregister.com.

Look for more reports about UNICEF in the future. We've invited UNICEF to defend itself from these charges in its pages. We hope it can. But if it can't counter the evidence that's been brought against it, we hope it will change its organization's ways.