The political secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, Anthony Ozimic, has warned that the use of the term "sexual and reproductive health" could be cloaking moves to make abortion more widely available and has criticised attempts to promote abortion as a means to solve human problems in developing countries.

Last Wednesday, numerous nations rejected an attempt to enshrine abortion as a human right at the adoption of the Disability Convention by the United Nations General Assembly.

Peter C. Smith, chief administrative officer at the UN for SPUC and the International Right To Life Federation, said: "Fifteen national delegations made good interpretative statements on the controversial term 'sexual and reproductive health', which is often falsely interpreted to include abortion."

The US and the Holy See gave particularly strong pro-life statements.

Mr Smith observed: "These interpretative statements mean that no one can claim that the Disability Convention includes a right to abortion, under the term 'sexual and reproductive health'."

Also this week, the UN's Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched its 2007 The State of the World's Children report, subtitled Women and Children: The Double Dividend of Gender Equality. According to the report, some 99 per cent of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries - two thirds of those occurring in 13 of the world's poorest countries.

The UNICEF report concluded that, "many of these women's lives could be saved if they had access to basic health care services, including skilled attendants at all births and emergency obstetric care for women who develop complications."

Ozimic hopes that the report's findings indicate a shift in UNICEF away from "its long record of not only interpreting 'health care' and 'obstetric care' to include abortion, but also promoting abortion at every available opportunity".

SPUC's political secretary criticised those who want to use abortion as a means of population control in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve maternal welfare.

A forthcoming report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health is expected to claim that population control is necessary to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Ozimic represented SPUC at a workshop in Rome held by MaterCare International, an association of health professionals who work to improve the lives and health of mothers and their unborn children through various initiatives based on the contemporary teaching of the Encyclical Encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life, by the late Pope John Paul II).

MaterCare has recently been granted special consultative status as a non-governmental organisation at the United Nations and is the obstetrics/gynaecology wing of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations.

Speakers at the workshop, themed The Dignity Of Motherhood And The Practice Of Obstetrics - Challenging The Status Quo, included Vatican cardinals, professors of obstetrics/gynaecology, bioethics, theology and demography, and pro-life/pro-family leaders.

In one presentation, Maria Srodon of MaterCare Poland told of mothers in sub-Saharan Africa who are cast out of their homes because they suffer from obstetric fistula, a rupture of the genitor-urinary tract, and who have no chance of returning "because reproductive health priorities are to promote abortion and contraception, not help mothers". She said such mothers were victims of violations of the dignity of motherhood.

While SPUC agreed that the aims of the MDGs are largely positive and worthy of support, it echoed, however, the words of Pope Paul VI who told the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1974, "It is inadmissible that those who have control of the wealth and resources of mankind should try to resolve the problem of hunger by forbidding the poor to be born."

Ozimic said: "It is an inhuman way to solve human problems by eliminating humans."

He welcomed the Holy See's rejection this week of the UN Disability Convention, calling it a "stunning rebuke" and a "grave warning to the international community to stop exploiting the right to human development as a means of promoting abortion".