Vatican diplomat pushes back against UN document linking women’s development, abortion
September 18, 2025
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CWN Editor's Note: Commenting on a new UN Human Rights Council report, a Vatican diplomat pushed back against a section that linked women’s social development to legalized abortion (n. 44).
“This implies that social development is linked to the denial of the right to life to the child in the womb,” said Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, apostolic nuncio and Permanent Observer to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, Switzerland. The prelate added:
It is true that women in many parts of the world face difficult, or even tragic, situations involving suffering, violence, loneliness, a total lack of economic prospects, and depression and anxiety about the future. We should be honest and admit that it is by addressing these dramatic human situations that we can reach social development and the good of the world’s women and not by proposing false solutions, such as denying another person’s inviolable right to life, which is always a failure of law, of justice and ultimately of the entire society.
Archbishop Balestrero called for “a serious commitment to creating equal conditions, including providing [women] with access to education, quality healthcare, decent work, participation in every sphere of life, measures to alleviate poverty, and freedom from violence and discrimination.”
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