Last month, Population Research Institute (PRI) revealed the truth about the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO). Now you might think that an organization with such a name would be focused on improving maternal health or reducing neonatal mortality rates.
In fact, however, lurking under this innocent-sounding name is an organization that effectively operates as an arm of the population control movement with a strong emphasis on promoting global abortion.
Our report, entitled “FIGO: USAID Funding and the Promotion of Abortion in Ibero-America, Europe, and Asia,” contains abundant evidence from FIGO’s own website and other public sources that clearly expose its not-so-hidden political agenda.
And what is that agenda? Nothing less than decriminalizing abortion in every country around the globe and ensuring unrestricted access to this deadly procedure.
This isn’t just our interpretation. The report cites dozens of FIGO’s publications and statements clearly laying out this goal. FIGO stands condemned by its own words and actions, which clearly prove that it is a political advocacy platform serving the international abortion industry.
FIGO implements advocacy strategies, trains medical personnel, and promotes the distribution of misoprostol and mifepristone — drugs used in abortions. One of the most serious revelations is that the organization not only pushes for legal abortion but also protects those who perform illegal abortions. It has issued guidelines advising doctors not to report out-of-framework abortions, promoted unsupervised self-managed abortions, and pressured to eliminate conscience objections from professionals.
FIGO’s response to our report confirmed our conclusions, for the organization did not respond to our report with counter arguments or refutations. Rather, in a backhanded admission of how damning our evidence was, it took its website offline. Once posted online, any content can later be recovered using The Wayback Machine or similar services even if it is no longer directly accessible. Even worse for FIGO, removing content in this way almost constitutes an admission of guilt.
The leadership of FIGO seems to have belatedly realized this. Several days after their website vanished into the ether, it suddenly came back online. Or at least a highly sanitized version came back online, scrubbed of all its particularly radical content.
But as we continued to highlight our FIGO report, public interest in the organization’s activities grew. And FIGO decided to change their damage control strategy from deletion to concealment. They unloaded the full content again, but made it much harder for people visiting the site to access. They modified website parameters to block direct access via original links and disabled the internal search function for most of the content.
The evidence of their abortion advocacy remains available — if you can find it. The links given in the PRI FIGO report still work if pasted directly into Google, but other references require specific titles cited in the report.
FIGO’s evasive maneuvers not only confirm our report’s findings but also expose a strategy of concealment in the face of irrefutable truths.
As many of you know, abortion activists have regularly tried to hide their ideologically driven agendas from the wider public. They understand that most people find the idea that they are unwittingly funding abortion and population control projects to be abhorrent.
Following the shutdown of USAID in March of this year, emails from its acting executive secretary, Erica Carr, show that agency employees were instructed to destroy classified documents and sensitive files at its Washington, D.C. headquarters. USAID, like FIGO, wanted to hide what it was doing from the American public.
Today, FIGO — one of the world’s leading abortion promoters — is in panic. Our report unsettled them, exposed them, and forced them to backpedal. Pro-abortion activists, long used to operating with impunity and the backing of significant resources and international allies, now face a truth they cannot deny. They’re hiding — and that’s no accident. It’s the result of rigorous research and courageous work.
This is a critical moment. We can’t let it slip by. It’s time to double down on efforts to circulate our FIGO report in all the countries where it operates–through the media, networks, institutions, and advocacy spaces. The more its activities are known, the harder it will be for them to propagate their lies as science.
The truth saves lives.
You can read the full Population Research Institute report here: https://www.pop.org/figo-report-usaid-funding-and-promotion-of-abortion-in-ibero-america-africa-and-europe/
