As if defining women as “limitless, formless … the world”, like an Eldritch horror, weren’t bad enough, the UN commemorated this International Womens’ Day by declaring the rights of children to take drugs and have sex. UNAIDS is the United Nations’ effort to end AIDS by 2030, as part of its Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On 8 March 2023, UNAIDS released a set of twenty-one principles directed at “legislators, at all levels”, judges, magistrates, and Constitutional and Supreme Courts, to advance the decriminalisation of acts such as drug dependency, HIV transmission and prostitution. With its pathological permissiveness and push for freedom-without-consequences, the UN will terraform its member states into San Franciscan drug-and-disease-ridden dystopias.

The principles seek to dismantle prohibitions against prostitution, homeless people “engaging in life-sustaining economic activities in public places” such as “washing, urinating and defecating”, and “drug use or possession … including by anyone under the age of 18 or whilst pregnant”. They prohibit laws which proscribe abortion, or disbar minors accessing “gender affirming” chemical and surgical sterilisation treatments. They also enshrine tax-subsidised access to these irreversible surgeries, contraception and abortion as a “right”. Principle 19 proscribes prosecutions for the non-disclosure and transmission of HIV — making it legal to knowingly give someone AIDS.

Your dignity is subject to the interests of the super-state

Most disconcerting is Principle 16. It begins by stipulating no member state may criminalise “Consensual sexual conduct” irrespective of participants’ sex, gender identity or marital status. It then declares that “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law”. The UN states, in no uncertain terms, that children can exercise their “evolving capacities and progressive autonomy” to “make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct”. It is not that a child, in all times and places, cannot consent to sex. That consent is now extra-legally conditional on their “maturity and best interests”. 

Even with the most charitable interpretation of this — being the decriminalisation of sex between parties solely below the age of consent — the omission of clarifying that this does not apply to sex acts between adults and children falls afoul of Principle 1: that law “must not proscribe any act or omission in terms that are vague, imprecise, arbitrary or overly broad”. This lack of clarity may allow paedophiles to make perverse appeals to the subjective standard that the child was “mature” enough to consent.

The UN Principles appeal to two philosophical traditions: utilitarianism and intersectionality. Principle 14 states that people “make and act on decisions about one’s own body, sexuality and reproduction”. Bodily autonomy is conditional in Principle 2, however, on what stakeholders decree is in “certain fundamental public interests, namely, national security, public safety, public order, public health or public morals”. (Ironically, “public health” is mis-spelled “pubic” in the document.) This explains the inconsistency in how bodily autonomy matters for abortion and trans surgeries, but not when member states subject citizens to vaccine mandates. Your dignity is subject to the interests of the super-state. 

These interests are unabashedly Woke. In the introduction to the document, retired justice Edwin Cameron writes, “as a proudly gay man, I know profoundly how criminal law signals which groups are deemed worthy of protection — and which of condemnation and ostracism”. Cameron conceptualises law as a weapon for marginalisation and oppression, and so he desires to invert it to correct inequitable outcomes for “vulnerable groups”. These groups are defined by the power-plus-privilege paradigm of intersectionality. 

Intersectionality is a paranoid delusion, that “recognises that people may experience discrimination on one or multiple, intersecting grounds of discrimination” and then attributes conspiratorial motive to all laws as upholding disequilibrated “colonial, xenophobic, racist, sexist, classist, ableist, cultural, religious, social, political, economic and other power dynamics” between identity groups. The members of said groups subjected to systemic discrimination become the most eligible to form a coalition of the oppressed to construct an offence-free utopia. These are the “stakeholders” whom the principles seek to serve.

Sacrificing one’s child becomes a sacrament to advance one’s liberty

Intersectional ideology has infected America’s Democrat cities. California has reduced penalties for knowingly transmitting HIV and sex between “young LGBT people” below the age of consent. It is becoming a “sanctuary state” for child transition surgeries without parental consent and unrestricted abortions. LA is the porn “capital of the world”. It will only benefit from the UN’s call to create a commercial sex trade, appealing to “consent” to wave away concerns that addiction and abuse are rife in the industry. California has the fifth highest homicide rate in the country — behind other Democrat cities who defunded police departments after the 2020 BLM riots. Its “clean needle” programme made the state a refugee camp for drug addicts — with San Francisco seeing 743 lethal overdoses in 2021. Rather than combat this, adopting the UNAIDS principles will turn countries into copycats of California — where citizens are fleeing in the thousands for Florida and Texas. 

An egregious extension of Californian thinking by the UN is its principle proscribing the prosecution of mothers for taking drugs, drinking alcohol or transmitting HIV to their child whilst pregnant. This is not a new idea: in the same collection of essays compiled by the progenitor of intersectionality Kimberle Crensahw, critical race theorist Dorothy E. Roberts argued, “Poor crack addicts are punished for having babies because they fail to measure up to the state’s ideal of motherhood.” To criminalise poisoning an unborn baby with crack is “particularly harsh for poor women of colour [ … ] the least able to conform to the white, middle-class standard of motherhood”. To protect the unborn child from involuntary drug addiction is seen as an unjust incursion on a mother’s autonomy, to “deny poor black women a facet of their humanity by punishing their reproductive choices”.

As Mary Harrington would say: autonomy-maximising materialist liberalism promises freedom and pleasure, but produces chaos and death. Any involuntary relationship is treated as an unwanted incursion on one’s rights. Child safety is subordinated to adults’ entitlement to indulge, unabated, in vice — even at the expense of their lives. Sacrificing one’s child becomes a sacrament to advance one’s liberty. 

The UN laments how “in recent years, in some quarters, there has been a backlash against human rights”, concerning LGBTQ+ acceptance and abortion. The UN’s own reputation has been marred by hiring 3,300 paedophiles, who have committed over 60,000 rapes in recent years. Given that these principles are encompassed in their SDGs, and that the UN has partnered with Thomas the Tank Engine to market SDGs to children, we are right to question their professed benevolent intent when advancing these causes. Whilst the UN continues to push this entropic ideology and policies on children, member states should seriously reconsider their commitments to funding it.