Sir, - RT╔ Radio has been broadcasting an advertisement in which a spokeswoman from the Dublin office of UNICEF, the UN Children's Emergency Fund, solicits donations towards its relief efforts in famine-stricken Afghanistan. Those people who feel moved by reports of starving children to respond to this appeal may be interested to read the following facts about some of the policies being promoted and funded by this UN agency.
In the 1987 International Conference to Improve the Health of Women and Children Through Family Planning, UNICEF openly supported abortion as a "legal service, of good quality and accessible to all women". In 1992, UNICEF pressed to have abortion legalised in countries where it was illegal.
Archbishop Renato Martino, the Vatican's permanent observer at the UN, declared before UNICEF's executive council on April 17th, 1990, that the group had become a promoter of abortion. Subsequently, in 1996, the Vatican withdrew its symbolic annual contribution to UNICEF after the agency confirmed it had distributed abortifacient substances in Rwanda and Zaire. As Archbishop Martino noted, instead of allocating funds to help children, UNICEF was using them to put an end to human lives! UNICEF's annual report for the year 1996 included abortion as "one of the most effective means to combat poverty".
The abandoning of respect for the sanctity of every human life is a root cause of most evils afflicting our world today - and not just the pitiless evil visited by devilish terrorists on America and its people on September 11th. One of the foundation principles of any moral code is, surely, that the end can never justify immoral means.
How, then, can UNICEF credibly claim it is animated solely by humanitarian concerns when it declares the very laudable aim of eliminating world poverty justifies the deliberate destruction of the lives of innocent, defenceless unborn children? - Yours, etc.,
Mrs D. Bourke, Lee Road, Cork.