Arpad Nagy's blog

It has been a couple days since my return from New York. I was at the United Nation as a delegate at the Comission on the Status of Women (CSW).

I am working hard at finishing my UN-related reports, answering e-mails and continuing with the backlog from being away at the UN. Since the Friday reports are fresh in my mind, here is a little summary of three of the events I attended last Friday. There were several hundred events during this first week of CSW, and our team spread out to attend as many of them as possible.

The main UN building's beauty (or lack there of) reflects well the content on what goes on inside as well. 

First, I attended an event hosted by the republic of Guinea. That event was focused on gender equality in the workforce and highlighting the advances already made in that field. Charlotte Daffé, the Minister of the promotion of Women, Children and Vulnerable Persons of the Republic of Guinea, revealed a project called Simandou 2040. This project has for goal to highlight key businesswomen who had done an exceptional job in their own field.  Other ministers and delegates spoke on related issues. For example, in education, the distribution of 19,000 hygiene kits for girls in school and the creation of separate washrooms for boys and girls was emphasized.

The Guinean event was packed!

It was all neat and nice, but I could read through the line. The last speaker, Francesco Galtieri, UNFPA country representative in Guinea linked it all together for me. For a country that is more traditional, the forces at the UN try to go for a soft sell. Because who doesn’t want gender equality in the workforce? Who doesn’t want education? Galtieri was the last panelist and the first to mention Sexual and reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR for short—which in short means promotion of contraception and abortion) and Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE for short—this is the promotion of sexual deviance of all kinds in schools).  Because a lot of African countries rely on foreign aid, they are under heavy pressure to compromise on their national values and priorities to get necessary funding for essential services.

Galtieri (to the right) educates the Guinean delegation on how better to advance SRHR and CSE in their country.

During Question period, a pro-life delegate, Jean Crocco, made an intervention to challenge the UNFPA representative. She said: “I did feel that the representative from UNFPA was lecturing you to not have children. And I just wanted to say that I have ten children and I think that’s the most valuable thing in my life, and that your country, your culture need not give up on the hope of children in order to have prosperity.” This was followed by a decent applause from the participants in the room.

Jean, a pro-life delegate, challenges the UNFPA's anti-family and anti-children policies. 

Second, I attended an event entitled Redefining Inclusivity: Transgender Rights in Workplaces and Public Spaces, hosted by the University of Massachusetts. This event featured a panel of trans activists and trans professors. This event had a strong focus on washrooms and gave arguments from various perspectives on how to address the issue. I was pleasantly surprised that nothing too radical was said. Instead, the presentation was calm, controlled, and respectful of diverging opinions. It seemed to want to create a positive discussion on how to address this important issue within the trans community. Of course, I did have a diverging opinion with most of the content presented but felt like this was a space we could actually have a discussion.

The 2nd event: Transgender right in workplaces and public spaces. 

I suspected that the organizers of this parallel event wanted to avoid talking about other trans issues (like trans in sports: biological males competing in female sports). One of the panellists acknowledged the importance of (biological) female spaces, to ensure that all women feel safe in female-only spaces.

The 3rd event. Advancing radical SRHR policies in the Middle East. 

Third, I attended an event entitled Unfinished Business: Beijing +30: Reflections on SRHR in the MENA region. (The MENA region—that’s Middle East and North Africa.) Now this one was interesting. As there were not many events happening concurrently, we had a larger pro-life presence in the room for this one. The event started out with the moderator asking participants to scan a QR code and answer a question on SRHR. Of course, all the pro-lifers in the room filled in the answers too. The answers were posted on the screen and read out loud by the moderator!

Pro-life views trickled into the event. Pro-life answers to the question were also read out loud, including "The total prohibition of abortion", "killing babies is always bad" and "ending abortion, which kills an innocent human being".

When it came to the panellist’s presentations, they were all in line with the agenda of promoting SRHR, but they did raise issues that any well-intentioned human being should have compassion towards: pregnant women in Gaza giving birth in camps in unsanitary settings, the increased likelihood of miscarriages and trauma of all sorts in war zones, breastfeeding women who don’t have milk because of malnutrition, rape and abuse by soldiers, etc. There was also talk of censorship in digital platforms (we have also often been censured). The last of the presenters was much more intense and in line with the radical feminist agenda, and it came through in her presentation.  

After the presentations, the Question period was cut short since, right off the bat, one of our pro-life delegates asked a question that connected abortion to genocide (since genocide was mentioned in one of the presentations).

This radical pro-abortion event was badly attended. Perhaps because it was late in the day? It didn't stop them from going full force...

Then we went to the third part of the event: discussion on SRHR. I attempted to join the group — “SRHR and climate change.” I was genuinely interested in how those two topics could even go together. But I was a man dressed in a three-piece suit. That stuck out in a room full of feminists, and as some other pro-lifers had already attempted to ask questions, they made the connection between us. I sat down in the circle along with two African delegates, and right away, the moderator came at me, aggressively asking if I fully support SRHR. Without even being able to fully reply, I was asked to leave because I didn’t belong there (I was not from the MENA region). The two women next to me also thought they had to leave, since they also were not from the MENA region, but the moderator specified it was just me. I acknowledged that I was going to comply and leave, and right away, she followed up by harshly saying that she is calling security on me. After going to the lobby, one of the panellists (the radical one) came after me (with one of the main organizers) and accused me of disrupting the event, threatening people and making people unsafe, which I calmly denied. I was asked to leave the building, and I left.

So, these were three events that were very different from one another. First, one that is not radically opposed to our pro-life and pro-family position, but have some questionable elements; Second, one that is radically opposed to our pro-life and pro-family position but presented with respect for diverging opinions; and third, one that radically opposed to our pro-life and pro-family position and are hostile beyond measure to our simple presence.

In general, all side events and all parallel events (that we attended), with the exception of one side event hosted by the Holy See, fell in one of these three categories.

In my next blog, I will talk about the Holy See event, as well as the pro-life and pro-family conference that ran concurrently to the events at CSW.

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