Funding questions don’t only apply to which money is or isn’t being used for abortions. If you happen to live in an EU member country like Hungary, you also can’t use funds to promote abortion alternatives, because that’s not in keeping with “EU values”. This imposing of values can go even further, as Ireland learn back in December.
byThe European Commission requested Hungary to stop its anti-abortion campaign because it was financed mainly using EU money allotted to gender equality projects.
The Hungarian government earlier this year chose against an outright ban on abortion, but started an ad campaign hoping to reduce the numbers of legal abortions. The campaign is set to run for two months and show a picture of a fetus with the words, “I understand it if you aren’t ready for me, but rather put me up for adoption, let me live!”
Through the Progress Fund, the EU subsidizes projects aimed at gender equality. Some members of the European Parliament asked the European Commission in May whether the Commission was aware that the fund, designed to support the implementation of the EU’s social agenda, was being used to finance an anti-abortion campaign.
In response, commission vice-president Viviane Reding urged Hungarian authorities to immediately stop the campaign, saying its funding using EU money was improper.
david clark says
Aha!. The inequality of ‘equality’. The inherent problem of the unity, ‘equality’, with the EU and organizations like Human Rights Commissions or the International Criminal Court is that certain ‘values’ are deemed more valuable than others. The simple and clear Animal Farm spoke of this reality when world governments were making motions to create such lustrous entities and ignoring that they would create systems where some participants would be more equal than others. The insidious nature of ‘values’ whether it be in European Values or things like ‘Values Education’ is that it ignores someone(s) will be in the position of determining which value will determine the acceptability of all the others – the ‘Terror of ‘equality’.