WHO Publishes Working Group Guidelines Stacked With Planned Parenthood Officials and Abortionists Promoting "a Complete Liberalization of Abortion That Is Unprecedented in the World"

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that its mission is to “keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable,” yet when it comes to the most vulnerable among us, it does the exact opposite.

Individuals and groups promoting abortion continue to relentlessly seek international support for this violent act. This time, abortion militants, paid by private pro-abortion organizations, drafted “Abortion Care Guideline” (guidelines) for the WHO.

Our international affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), has sent a powerful letter to the Permanent Representatives of the States Members to the WHO in Geneva, highlighting several problematic aspects of the new guidelines.

The WHO and the Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) published the guidelines in March 2022. Instead of providing assistance and advice to health professionals per its stated purpose of “promot[ing] healthier lives – from pregnancy care through old age,” the WHO guidelines do the opposite. The new guidelines recommend, inter alia, legalizing abortion on demand and without conditions until the end of the pregnancy, reducing the freedom of conscience of medical professionals, and not informing parents in case of an abortion performed on their minor daughter.

Our letter points out three key problems of this document.

First, we informed the Permanent Representatives that the guidelines are not legally binding. They were “not adopted by States, nor by the WHO Secretariat, but by an ad hoc WHO working group composed mainly of abortion activists.” Because the document has no legal value, States should not give any weight to it, let alone follow it. This is especially so, we argued, in light of the fact that “there is no international right to abortion. No international convention obliges States to legalize the practice.”

Second, we informed the Permanent Representatives that although the guidelines are presented as an expert document, the “scientific value of this document is relative and open to criticism. The drafting group acknowledges that it does not have conclusive scientific studies to support 20 of its 54 recommendations.” At least 20 recommendations suggest practices without direct evidence or precise scientific data or have little to no scientific evidence to support them.

Many of these guidelines are “purely political or ideological” and “are not medical or scientific in nature.” For instance, the guidelines recommend to not inform parents in the case of an abortion on a minor girl. No scientific or health benefit is related to such a recommendation.

Opposing the guidelines’ underlying misconception that abortion is a “safe medical procedure,” our letter argued that scientific evidence instead exists as to the health risks for the mothers who abort their babies. Such risks include not only psychological and emotional problems, such as depression, but also the increased risk of having, inter alia, breast cancer and giving birth to premature babies later on.

We also noted that the “guidelines ignore the conceived child and refer to it only as ‘pregnancy tissue’ to be discarded with the ‘biological material.’ This disregard for the human being before birth is inhumane and outrageous, especially since the guidelines recommend legalizing abortion until birth.”

Third, we informed the Permanent Representatives:

To develop these guidelines, the WHO consulted 121 experts from outside the organization. However, 81 of these “experts,” or nearly 67%, either worked for or were activists promoting abortion, or were paid by private abortion organizations. For example, 11 of these experts received nearly $1,800,000 over the course of their careers from the Society of Family Planning & SFP Researcher Fund (funded in 2020 to the tune of US$3,024,868 by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation). Of the 142 people who worked on the guidelines (including members of the WHO Steering Group and the WHO Secretariat), 91 have an activist profile (64%).

Furthermore, the “guidelines were written by Fiona de Londras, Bela Ganatra, Heidi Johnston, Caron Kim, Antonella Lavelanet, Jane Patten, and Maria Rodriguez, all well-known abortion activists. For example, Fiona de Londras is a radical activist, author of numerous pro-abortion articles, and intervened before the U.S. Supreme Court to that extent.”

With the letter, we also provided the full list of contributors to the guidelines, detailing their deep connections to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. The massive presence of such activists and their supporters explains why the guidelines fully reflect the demands of the large private groups to promote abortion around the world. These are problematic facts.

We have informed the Permanent Representatives that we will be preparing a detailed analysis of the guidelines to expose their real nature, i.e., the guidelines disregard human life, and they are nothing more than the abortion activists’ political and ideological preferences, which they desperately want to impose on the entire world.