One might call Melanne Verveer “the pro-abortion Catholic’s pro-abortion Catholic.”

Verveer, appointed last week by President Barack Obama as “Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues,” has impeccable dissenting Catholic credentials on abortion, as documented by Jack Smith at the Catholic Key blog.

What exactly will be Verveer’s duties, in serving as Obama’s “Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues”?

That remains to be seen. But it’s a safe bet that one of her central duties will be to assist in the utilization of the United Nations to advance abortion, contraception, homosexual rights and other morally objectionable agendas, both domestically and in foreign countries.

For U.N. neophytes, here’s how this process works. I became acquainted with it when I monitored U.N. proceedings as a pro-life and pro-family journalist for a few years in the late 1990s, at a time when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was promoting these immoral agendas through the U.N. at every opportunity. (Verveer, it should be noted, served as Clinton’s chief-of-staff and as chief assistant to Clinton’s international activities while Clinton was First Lady.)

It’s a two-way process. The first part of the process works like this: In collaboration with other Western delegations, the United States uses U.N. agencies and U.N. processes and U.N.-funded organizations to force abortion, contraception and homosexual rights on impoverished developing countries.

These countries, many of which are predominantly Catholic, often want no part of these agendas. Their desires matter little at the U.N., however, since the U.N. is dominated by the perspectives of the powerful Western governments who provide most of its funding.

The second part of the process works like this: United Nations treaties and other U.N. documents are used to force incorporation of the same anti-life and anti-family agendas into U.S. law at the national, state and local level. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by the ratification of U.N. treaties by the U.S. Senate and by the citing of U.N. documents as legal precedents by U.S. judges.

In other words, the U.N. is used to export the Culture of Death to foreign countries, and to import the Culture of Death into the United States. It’s a bad trade for everyone involved.