“The pro-abortion World Health Organization (WHO) has been preparing for years to exploit a pandemic”, says John Smeaton, SPUC Chief Executive, responding to a WHO spokesperson labelling abortion an “essential service” even when COVID-19 is claiming thousands of lives.
Speaking to 5,000 people online on 27 March, Dr Antonella Lavalanet, Medical Officer in the WHO’s “Maternal and Perinatal Health & Preventing Unsafe Abortion Team”, said, in accordance with new WHO guidelines, that “women’s choices and rights to sexual reproductive health care should be respected irrespective of COVID-19 status”.
Drugs used in medical abortions were already listed as “essential medications” by WHO in 2017.
Exploiting the Coronavirus pandemic
During the webinar hosted by Sexual Reproductive Health Matters, a pro-abortion journal, Dr Lavalanet said that WHO was working with the UN to form guidance underlining abortion as “essential”, even during a pandemic.
It was also made clear that these instructions are aimed primarily at governments that “are trying to deprioritize these services”.
Significantly, the WHO officer asserted that, in response to COVID-19 and under-pressure health services, the WHO was advising that women should be able to “manage their own safe abortions” at home, “using mifepristone and misoprostol up until 12 weeks”.
Moreover, the WHO is prepared to forego safeguards and certain treatments, such as antibiotics, in order to allow abortions to continue. Dr Lavalanet also said that human resource workers should be redirected to abortion administration services.
WHO’s anti-life, anti-family history
The WHO has clearly anticipated such a crisis that could be exploited to further its pro-abortion agenda.
The 2012 WHO publication “Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems” repeatedly presented abortion as an integral part of so-called “reproductive health services” – from children at school to women in “emergency” situations.
In this document, the WHO linked abortion with “human rights” and “medical procedures”, emphasising that laws “that criminalize medical procedures, including abortion, needed only by women and/or that punish women”, should be repealed.
In 2012, the WHO also published a policy brief titled “Integrating sexual and reproductive health into health emergency and disaster risk management”, which foresaw a Coronavirus-type crisis.
Mr Smeaton said: “The World Health Organization has a long anti-family and anti-life history – indeed its first director, Dr Brock Chisholm, wrote in 1948: ‘Children have to be freed from… religious and other cultural “prejudices” forced upon them by parents and religious authorities’.
“I am praying that the Coronavirus crisis will have good consequences in addition to the obvious tragic consequences we are witnessing, and that we see a counter-revolution led by families.
“After all, it is individual families worldwide on which Governments worldwide have to rely, calling on them to care for themselves and their children, and to stay in the privacy of their own homes, in order to save the world from disaster.
Now is the right time, therefore, for individual families worldwide to start work on building a counter-revolution to rid themselves from pro-abortion and anti-family legislation being imposed by governments and international authorities such as the World Health Organization.”