Tag: EU

my voice my choice

Response to EU initiative, “My Voice My Choice”

Published on by EF TeamLeave a comment

Endeavour Forum’s US-based chief administrative officer, Denise Mountenay, has written this response to a proposal by the EU to fund the travel expenses of women wishing to procure an abortion in a foreign country. The “My Voice My Choice” campaign aims to accommodate women whose own countries limit access to abortion.

Pro-life legal expert, Nicolas Bauer, calls the initiative, “a new step in the pro-abortion lobby’s strategy to promote abortion through supranational institutions”, giving the following as examples of how the new law would work: “… a French woman who is 22 weeks pregnant, and therefore outside the legal time limit for an abortion, could travel to the Netherlands and have an abortion there with EU funding. A Polish woman whose child has Down syndrome and who wishes to have an abortion for this reason could travel to France to do so, with EU funding.”

Concerns Regarding the “My Voice My Choice” Initiative and Its Implications for EU Competence & Women’s Health & Human Rights

by Denise Mountenay

Dear President of the European Commission & ALL Commissioners:  

I am writing to respectfully express my deep concern regarding the upcoming decision of the European Commission concerning the “My Voice My Choice” initiative. As proposed, this initiative would enable EU‑funded travel for women seeking abortions in Member States with more permissive laws, effectively allowing individuals to bypass the legal safeguards, gestational limits, and ethical frameworks established by their own countries.

This raises significant concerns regarding EU competence, Member State sovereignty, and the ethical diversity protected within the Union. Abortion legislation has always been the responsibility of Member States, reflecting their constitutional, cultural, and moral values. The EU has no competence in this area, yet it does have competence to support motherhood, families, and social protection—areas that deserve strengthening rather than displacement.

I also write from personal experience. As a former abortion patient, I—like many young pregnant women—was misinformed, deceived, and pressured into undergoing abortions. My experience is not isolated. A recent study by David Reardon et al. documents the widespread reality of women being pressured into abortions they do not truly want. This is a serious women’s‑rights issue that deserves recognition.

There is also a substantial body of scientific literature raising concerns about the health consequences of induced abortion. More than 60 published studies in peer‑reviewed medical journals have identified a statistical association between induced abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer. Numerous studies document cervical and uterine trauma, contributing to preterm birth in subsequent wanted children. Additionally, dozens of studies report significant mental‑health impacts, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and trauma‑related symptoms. A Finnish government study found that women who undergo abortions are six times more likely to attempt or commit suicide compared to women who give birth.

For reference, I encourage you to review the research compiled at:
www.afterabortion.org
www.bcpinstitute.org

Beyond the medical concerns, induced abortion raises profound human‑rights questions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “Everyone has the inherent right to life.” Modern embryology is clear that human life begins at conception, when a genetically complete human organism comes into existence. By 3–4 weeks, the embryonic heart is beating. By 8–9 weeks, the developing child has arms, legs, fingers, toes, and rapidly forming organs. These are biological facts, not matters of ideology.

To permit the deliberate ending of these young lives simply because they are small, dependent, or temporarily residing in their mother’s womb is deeply troubling. Their size or location does not diminish their humanity. Nor should the economic interests of those who profit from abortion override the rights of the most vulnerable. These children have no voice; many of us who have lived through abortion and lost our children now speak on their behalf.

Rather than facilitating the destruction of unborn children across borders, the European Union should prioritize support for pregnant women, including financial, medical, and social assistance, and ensure that fathers are held responsible for their children. Strengthening support systems would uphold both women’s dignity and the rights of their children, without undermining Member State sovereignty or ethical diversity.

I respectfully urge the Commission to:

  • Recognize that abortion remains outside EU competence
  • Uphold the principle of subsidiarity
  • Protect the sovereign right of each Member State to determine its own laws
  • Prioritize policies that support women, motherhood, and families

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I trust that the Commission will carefully consider the legal, ethical, and social implications before taking any action.  We look forward to your reply.

Respectfully,
Denise Mountenay

NGO-Endeavour Forum Inc. In Consultative Status with ECOSOC

Chief Administrative Officer

Denise Mountenay is the chief administrative officer of the Endeavour Forum Inc. and is based in Canada. Since 2009, Denise has been leading teams into the United Nations headquarters in New York City to participate at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She has also represented Endeavour Forum at the UN headquarters in Geneva as a voice for the voiceless. Denise is founder of Together for Life and pursues pro-life film-making with Advancing Truth Alliance

pro-life groups

Pro-life groups lose European Union funding

Published on by EF TeamLeave a comment

The European Union blocked funding to two European pro-life groups charging that they do not adhere to “EU values,” specifically abortion, homosexual marriage, and gender ideology.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. and Kelly Heilman, J.D.

The European Union denied the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE) EU project funding six times in recent years. The World Youth Alliance received three review letters from the EU, which are essentially threats to lose funding. Both groups are pro-life and pro-family and say they are being targeted for their pro-life and pro-family beliefs.

FAFCE’s President, Vincenzo Bassi, told the Italian Bishops’ daily newspaper Avvenire, that his group was the target of “ideological discrimination” based on the EU Commission’s latest LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy.

Bassi explained that the Federation’s latest request for funds was turned down because it emphasized the importance of the family in their application and it is known that FAFCE represents Catholic families founded on the union of one man and one woman. EU authorities decided that “this focus (on the family) could violate EU equality norms” and that the group did not carry out enough “gender analysis” in its programs, which could in turn lead to discrimination.

FAFCE is one of Europe’s original pro-life and pro-family groups. It represents Catholic family associations from across Europe in EU institutions since 1997 and operates on a shoestring budget. In recent years it has held events and campaigns to promote family policies, the protection of children, and to oppose abortion and surrogacy.

The World Youth Alliance (WYA) is a youth organization that promotes the engagement of pro-life and pro-family youth with international institutions. It has received EU project funding in recent years but appears slated to lose it all because of its pro-life and pro-family work.

WYA was recently accused by the George Soros funded group openDemocracy with spreading false information about abortion. As a result, a formal compliance investigation into the organisation’s funding was opened and it was officially denied project funding. WYA’s status for future grants has not been determined.

WYA says the EU Commission does not have a legal basis for denying them funds. They argue that the Commission is relying on non-binding political decisions as if they were binding law.

EU funding projects are run by the EU Commission as the executive branch of the European Union. In recent years the Commission has begun to speak of “EU values” as a threshold issue for participating in EU civil society space and receiving EU funds.

The EU values that the Commission is purportedly enforcing are found in the 1992 Treaty on the European Union. That treaty provides the Commission with the authority to take action against EU member states for a failure to uphold “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities.” The Commission interprets these EU values to include homosexual and transgender issues as well as abortion and extrapolates that its mandate requires imposing these as ideological requirements on organizations that receive EU grants.

Discrimination against pro-life groups

These developments are part of a wider push by abortion and LGBT advocates to censor pro-family and pro-life groups and exclude them from participation in public debates. Several reports from groups funded by the EU Commission, the U.S. State Department, George Soros, and other progressive international actors call on international organizations to expel and deny participation to so-called “anti-rights” groups. Most recently, the “Next Wave Report” models this approach. It is authored by Neil Datta of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual & Reproductive Rights, an initiative of the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network.

Most civil society organisations and charities in the European Union receive public funds and would not be able to operate without them. Unlike the United States, where the tax code encourages independent civil society institutions for religious, educational and charitable purposes, Europe does not historically have a robust civil society. Public funding from European institutions has tried to fill that gap. The difficulties of FAFCE and WYA face at the EU Commission show the tradeoff that happens when independent civil society organisations, including pro-life groups become dependent on public funds.

Stefano Gennarini, J.D. and Kelly Heilman, J.D.

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

EU abortion

Abortion debate resurfaces at EU

Published on by EF TeamLeave a comment

European abortion advocates have gathered more than one million signatures asking the European Union to pay for women to travel abroad for their abortions. The idea is that the EU would pay for a Polish woman, for instance, to travel to France for a late-term abortion.

Nika Kovač, the representative of the “My Voice, My Choice” petition drive, said, “women from Poland have a good network of NGOs which are supporting their travels and medical procedures [for abortion]. But those medical procedures are costly, so what we want to do is to establish a way that NGOs or women themselves do not need to pay for them.”

Pro-life NGOs and members of the EU parliament came together in the European Parliament to object. “We are here today for a fight, a fight that is eminently political […] it is a fight for life,” said Laurence Trochu, French politician and member of the European Parliament.

The European Center for Law and Justice organized a response in the European Parliament. The conference, co-hosted by the One of Us Federation, the European People’s Party, and the European Conservatives and Reformists, the two main conservative parties in the EU Parliament, was the largest gathering of pro-life advocates in the EU Parliament in more than a decade.

“This petition is completely out of step with the reality of abortion,” said Nicolas Bauer, Senior Research Fellow at the ECLJ. Bauer warned against speaking of abortion “as a trivial choice” and said that the “‘My Voice My Choice’ is a denial of women’s suffering” and a “denial of the unborn child, who is the most innocent being there is.”

Six women testified to their emotional and psychological wounds inflicted by abortion. One French woman described her abortion as “not chosen but endured.” She described the pressure she felt from the father of her baby and the medical establishment to undergo the abortion. ​She sought advice from several doctors but didn’t find a single “neutral third party.” Instead, they downplayed her concerns and accelerated the abortion process. She recalled lying on the floor crying when the baby’s father put the pill in her mouth that was supposed to “help the baby come out.”

Bauer said the European Union, through its “support and coordination powers,” could do more to “support motherhood and the family” in line with Article 33 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that “[t]he protection of the family is ensured on the legal, economic and social level.”

Bauer noted one successful EU program that supported one hundred poor and isolated Italian families who were “overwhelmed by the demands of welcoming and raising children” but flagged that its funding was “modest” and “discontinued four years ago” and that “[s]ince then, nothing has been done at the European level to support motherhood and the family.”

“The European Union is responsible for supporting motherhood and family life, and this morning we are asking it to make this a priority,” Bauer continued

The petition is part of an EU program called the European Citizens’ Initiative, which allows one million or more EU citizens to direct the European institutions to take up a particular issue. It should be noted that pro-lifers tried this years ago with something called One of Us. Though they gathered more than 1 million signatures, the European institutions ignored the request.  The EU has yet to respond to the petition by pro-abortion groups.

By Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

AI censorship

EU turbocharges censorship of conservatives with AI regulation

Published on by EF TeamLeave a comment

Under the latest AI regulation from the EU, tech companies will be forced to censor content from conservative outlets under the guise of stopping ‘hate-speech.’

The EU Commission General-Purpose AI Code of Practice requires AI developers and tech companies to ensure that general-purpose AI models are “safe,” including through censorship of content that is “hateful, radicalizing, or false.”

The new regulation has the potential to turbocharge censorship and social control on all major tech platforms. Along with the notorious EU Digital Services Act, the regulation is expected to lead to new self-imposed automated AI censorship tools across all major technology platforms.

A section of the newly published standards highlights “harmful manipulation” as a specific major risk and appears to define it by reference to populist political narratives against EU transgender policies and mass immigration programs.

“Harmful manipulation” is defined in the regulation as “the strategic distortion of human behavior or beliefs by targeting large populations or high-stakes decision-makers through persuasion, deception, or personalized targeting.” This, the regulation explains, “could undermine democratic processes and fundamental rights, including exploitation based on protected characteristics.” Protected characteristics in the EU context is understood widely to refer to issues such as migration status or sexual orientation and gender identity.

The regulation requires tech companies to first identify a broad set of potential “systemic risks” under the categories of public health, safety, public security, fundamental rights, and society as a whole. Other specific dangers identified in the regulation include “misalignment with human values (e.g. disregard for fundamental rights)” and “discriminatory bias.” Once such risks are identified, AI developers and tech companies must then analyze and mitigate any potential systemic risks by “monitoring and filtering the model’s inputs and/or outputs.”

The standards are a “voluntary tool” designed to show that tech companies comply with the EU’s legislation on artificial intelligence, known as the AI Act. Even though they are only voluntary, companies that adopt the standards will be deemed to comply with the AI Act. “This will reduce their administrative burden and give them more legal certainty than if they proved compliance through other methods,” The EU Commission says.

The standards are predominantly prospective. They are not so much geared toward addressing existing problems in AI models as much as ensuring that future models comply with the standards by design so that the output of AI models conforms to the standards.

The new regulation is in addition to already exhausting censorship measures tech companies are required to adopt under the EU Digital Services Act. The EU Commission already required large tech companies to censor through the Code of Conduct on Disinformation. When it as first adopted in 2018 it was only a voluntary regulation, but it is now binding under the 2025 EU Digital Services Act adopted earlier this year.

The EU Digital Services Act requires large online platforms to censor content in line with the priorities of the EU Commission. The disinformation regulation expressly requires tech companies to censor and promote official EU propaganda through content moderation, demonetization, fact-checking, and counter-information.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance criticized the censorship rules of the EU Digital Services Act at an AI Summit in Paris in February this year.

“We feel strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias,” he said, “and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.” He also warned against the EU AI Act and its possible effect on innovation.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D 

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.