As the World Health Organization tries to finalize a global pandemic agreement, WHO released a new adolescent health study highlighting ways to “circumvent local barriers created by the COVID-19 pandemic” to deliver abortion, potentially abortifacient contraceptives, and “comprehensive sexuality education” to minors. WHO believes adolescents should receive these “services,” which it classifies as “sexual and reproductive health (SRH),” without parental consent or notification. The new report also decries “gender norms” and promises young participants in Global Model WHO activities will rub shoulders with representatives of all “gender identities.”
On Sunday — one day before the 77th annual World Health Assembly (WHA) convened to discuss the WHO Pandemic Agreement — WHO released the second edition of its adolescent health report titled “Working for a brighter, healthier future.”
The 83-page document highlights organizations that made “agile adaptations” to “circumvent local barriers created by the COVID-19 pandemic” and “meet the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs of adolescents during the COVID-19 crisis,” including carrying out abortion-on-demand. WHO praised organizations that “proactively and cleverly adapted” as they carried out “SRH information and education provision; contraceptive provision; abortion and post-abortion care provision … and human papillomavirus vaccine administration.” (Emphasis added.)
WHO views abortion as an “essential” service, which governments must make available even as other businesses and churches are shuttered during global health crises. “In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic … WHO has included comprehensive abortion care in the list of essential health services,” stated WHO’s March 2022 “abortion care guideline.” WHO also added the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol on its “List of Essential Medicines.”
“WHO has set out a vision of achieving the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescents globally,” says the report, produced by the HQ Interdepartmental Technical Working Group on Adolescent Health and Well-being.
The new report illustrates WHO’s antagonism to Supreme Court rulings that tolerate pro-life laws. It endorses another WHO document — “Committing to implementation of the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (2016–2030)” — which states: “Even as top national courts in countries including India, Mexico and Nepal have issued rulings in favour of women’s reproductive rights in the past couple of years, policies protecting these rights are under threat in many other places. For example, recent rulings in the United States of America and Poland have had a severe impact on women’s access to abortion.” (Emphasis added.) The first edition of the WHO adolescent health report boasted that “commitments to adolescent-friendly SRH services have gained new momentum” when the Pan American Health Organization issued “a call to revise restrictive laws on abortion.”
The adolescent health dossier advises doctors to replace parental control over their children’s health decisions with “a rights-based approach to adolescent health care” that transfers these decisions to unemancipated minors. WHO boasts of developing “a practical tool for use by professionals in adolescent health” whose “aim is to move from a vertical, paternalistic, unilateral view of assessment to a much more horizontal, integrated process, with the adolescent as a partner at the centre of the process.”
The 2021 WHO tool linked in the report told nations that “[c]onsideration should also be given to a legal presumption that adolescents are competent to seek and have access to preventive or time-sensitive sexual and reproductive health commodities and services.” Specifically, that document “[r]ecommends removal of mandatory third-party (e.g. parent, guardian or spousal) authorization or notification for the provision of sexual and reproductive health services, including information on contraceptive services.” The first edition of the WHO adolescent health report also stated teenagers can make “autonomous decisions about their SRH.”
The new report notes that WHO sees itself “driving the agenda” on adolescent health.
As in other areas, President Joe Biden has taken WHO’s sexual guidelines for teens to heart. As The Washington Stand revealed last summer, the Biden administration promoted a document and funded a training session telling Planned Parenthood and other taxpayer-funded family planning offices how to talk to minors about sex and secretly deliver contraceptives to adolescents without their parents’ knowledge or consent. As part of its efforts to “expand sexual and reproductive health information and services” to teenagers during National Adolescent Health Month last May, the administration posted a link to a webinar describing how Title X providers mail unmarked bags of “little toys” and contraceptives to minors without parental notification, take sexual calls with teens “in the bathroom with the door locked,” and considered having vans roam through communities handing out birth control to teenagers.
“[P]arents might not agree with some of the things that we’re talking about and some of the services that our patients are looking for,” admitted one participant.
The WHA, like the document, put “sexual and reproductive health” at the heart of its public health policy recommendations. “A lot of the European nations were pledging their support towards sexual reproductive health or reproductive rights in the name of a global health security concept,” Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told former Congressman Jody Hice on Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” Weber has posted daily updates on the WHO meeting from Geneva at WashingtonStand.com.
Despite the SRH focus, numerous “experts” at the conference released an open letter accusing WHO of “backsliding” on SRH. SRH, including “the affirmation of individuals and families in all their diversity” and “[l]egislative action broadening access to abortion,” is “fundamental for human rights and dignity,” they insisted.
Breaking ‘Gender Norms’ and Teaching ‘Comprehensive’ Sex Ed during Lockdowns
Although COVID-related school closures and widespread lockdowns created a mental health emergency that spiked suicide rates among teenage girls, WHO’s new report notes that it carried out studies in four nations aimed at “delivering comprehensive sexuality education to different groups of adolescents in the out-of-school context.” So-called “comprehensive sex education” jettisons abstinence-based teaching in favor of often-explicit curricula instructing teens how to use condoms and other contraceptives. Its leading U.S. proponent, SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, has stated, “With sex education, we have a golden opportunity to create a culture shift — tackling the misinformation, shame, and stigma” of abortion and LGBTQ practices, as well as “[d]ismantling white supremacy.”
The 2022 version of WHO’s teenage health report states that WHO hopes to “provide adolescents with opportunities to develop the skills they will need … to challenge and change their social environments … catalysing their engagement in advocacy.” The new WHO report also urges nations to “overcome stigmatization and discrimination.” WHO plans to expand its sex education studies to seven more nations, mostly in the developing world.
WHO also hopes to break “gender norms,” the 2024 report says. “Gender inequality and harmful social norms persist,” states the report. “The social contexts in which adolescents grow up influence their health outcomes,” it asserts, particularly “[w]here restrictive gender norms are established during childhood and adolescence.”
The World Health Organization also plans to ensure that children who participate in school activities like the Global Model WHO — a program similar to the Model UN, open to high school and college students — will encounter “representation from different … gender identities.”
‘Climate Action and Political Representation’ as Components of Teenage Health
Critics have long documented how the World Health Organization has conflated political causes with “public health.” The new adolescent health document bolsters their case. It states, “WHO[’s] work on adolescent health and well-being is underpinned” by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include such alleged health factors as “decent jobs, education and training that is fit for the future, gender equality, climate action and political representation.”
The WHO report does cover some areas of traditional medicine, noting that WHO intends to promote controversial COVID injections for minors. The report hails the work of WHO’s Health and Multilateral Partnerships Department (HMP), noting it “provides guidance on immunization” which “may include adolescents and young people, like measles, influenza, and COVID-19, and some, like the HPV vaccine specifically for adolescents.” COVID injections have been linked to myocarditis in young men, who stand a lower risk of serious infection in the first place.
The World Health Assembly closed Saturday.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
