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The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has published a report titled “Accelerating progress towards preventing pregnancy among adolescent girls,” prepared at the request of the Human Rights Council pursuant to its resolution. The document is based on submissions from, among others, states, and on consultations with adolescent girls, experts, and non-governmental organizations.

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Among the recommendations to states is a call to decriminalize abortion and to guarantee adolescents legal access to it, based on views issued by UN treaty bodies in individual cases.

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The report calls for abolishing the requirement of parental or guardian consent for adolescents’ access to so-called sexual and reproductive health services—including abortion—and advocates introducing a legal presumption that adolescents are competent to make such decisions, irrespective of age.

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The report describes “abstinence-based sex education” as “inaccurate or even prejudicial,” while “comprehensive sexuality education,” which includes content on “gender and power,” is presented as the only effective preventive tool.

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The report portrays states’ restrictions on funding for organizations “promoting abortion” as a threat to girls’ health and rights, rather than as a sovereign budgetary and political decision of the state.

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As “promising practices,” the report cites, among others, the legal expansion of access to abortion in countries of Latin America and West Africa, even though the most effective of all the programs described—implemented in Thailand—achieved a dramatic drop in adolescent pregnancies without resorting to the decriminalization of abortion.


 

The UN Human Rights Council has received the report of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) titled “Accelerating progress towards preventing pregnancy among adolescent girls,” published on June 23, 2026, as document A/HRC/62/62 and prepared pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 56/21. The document was drawn up on the basis of 66 submissions received in response to a questionnaire, including from states, as well as virtual consultations with adolescent girls, experts from various regions, and representatives of civil society organizations and UN entities (para. 1). The scale of the phenomenon addressed by the report is real: in 2025, approximately 12.3 million girls aged 10–19 gave birth, a 12% decline from 14 million in 2015. Every year, around 21 million adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries become pregnant; about half of those pregnancies are unintended, and 55% of unintended pregnancies end in abortion, which is frequently “unsafe,” as “legal abortion care is often unavailable” (paras. 5–6).

A real problem at the outset

Much of the diagnosis contained in the report describes phenomena whose harmfulness is beyond doubt. As of 2023, 640 million women and girls worldwide had been married before reaching adulthood, and about 9 in 10 adolescent births in low- and middle-income countries occur among girls married before the age of 18 (para. 13). More than 370 million women and girls (one in eight) have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18, and in armed-conflict settings this proportion rises to more than one in four girls aged 14–17 (para. 15). The Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women state unequivocally that the minimum age of marriage should be 18, without exception (para. 14). That position, like the call for the effective prosecution of perpetrators of sexual violence against girls and for the protection of the right of pregnant girls and teenage mothers to continue their education (para. 25), deserves full support and raises no controversy whatsoever.

Abortion as a “human right” of adolescent girls

The problem begins where the report moves from diagnosis to legal conclusions. The starting point is the view of the Committee on the Rights of the Child issued in an individual case, according to which denying girls information about, and access to, abortion exposes them to serious risks to their lives, health, and development, “effectively forcing them” to continue pregnancies (para. 18). The Human Rights Committee, relying on the cases of Susana v. Nicaragua, Lucía v. Nicaragua, Norma v. Ecuador, and Fátima v. Guatemala, held that “forced pregnancy and motherhood” violates the right to a dignified life (para. 18). On this basis, the report formulates recommendation 59(b): abortion should be decriminalized and legally accessible to adolescents, purportedly “in line with international human rights law and standards,” while the Committee on the Rights of the Child has considered that abortion should be decriminalized in all cases involving child pregnancy (para. 39).

It is worth calling things by their name: no treaty ratified by UN member states—neither the Convention on the Rights of the Child, nor the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, nor the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)—sets forth a so-called right to abortion. The grounds invoked in the report are decisions in individual cases (views) and general comments of treaty bodies, that is, expert bodies overseeing the implementation of treaties, whose positions are interpretive and non-binding in nature, unlike court judgments or treaty norms adopted by states. The report’s legal construction consists in presenting this non-binding interpretation as a binding standard of international human rights law, which is a classic example of new law being built by UN expert bodies without a treaty process in which states could express their consent or objection.

Abolishing parental consent to medical treatment and abortion for adolescent girls

Equally far-reaching is the recommendation concerning parental consent. Citing the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the report calls for removing requirements for third-party consent—which, after all, in most cases means a parent or guardian—as a condition for adolescents’ access to contraception, HIV testing, or abortion, arguing that such a requirement discourages adolescents from seeking help for fear of rejection, stigmatization, hostility, or even violence (para. 37). The Committee also recommends considering the introduction of a legal presumption that adolescents are competent to independently access so-called sexual and reproductive health services, irrespective of age (para. 38).

This recommendation passes over in silence the fact that the Convention on the Rights of the Child itself, in Article 5, obliges states to respect the responsibilities, rights, and duties of parents to provide direction and guidance to the child in a manner consistent with the child’s evolving capacities—a provision the report interprets exclusively as a process of gradually expanding the child’s autonomy vis-à-vis the family, never as a justification for preserving the role of parents in decisions as significant as abortion. Removing the requirement of parental consent to abortion for a minor is not a technical improvement in access to healthcare, but the removal of a fundamental decision—concerning the life of the unborn child and the fate of the adolescent girl herself—from the sphere of responsibility of the parents and the family, which Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes as the natural and fundamental group unit of society.

Abstinence education as “prejudicial” content

The section devoted to sexuality education (paras. 27–30) defines so-called comprehensive sexuality education as a process of teaching and learning about “the emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality,” based on values such as “respect, inclusion, non-discrimination, equality, empathy, responsibility and reciprocity” (para. 27). The report cites UNESCO data according to which such education is five times more likely to be successful in preventing unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections when explicit attention is given to the topics of “gender and power,” including violence (para. 28). In the same passage, the report states outright that in certain countries the content of sexuality education is “inaccurate or even prejudicial, including through the promotion of abstinence as the only contraceptive measures,” which supposedly renders it ineffective in preventing adolescent pregnancy (para. 29).

This wording deserves attention because, in a single sentence, it labels as “prejudicial” an educational approach that many parents around the world—in keeping with their religious, moral, and cultural convictions—consciously choose for their children, without offering any counterargument or referring to studies showing, for example, the effectiveness of programs based on premarital chastity in certain cultural contexts. Moreover, the report leaves no room for a plurality of educational models: the only standard recognized as “evidence-based” and consistent with human rights is to be a model that includes, in accordance with recommendation 59(e), content addressing “gender norms, power dynamics and digital misinformation,” implemented on a mandatory basis as part of the school curriculum and extended to children outside the school system as well.

Pressure on development aid donor states

The report takes a critical view of the decline in global donor funding for so-called sexual and reproductive health services in 2025–2026, noting that these cuts have sometimes been coupled with the requirement that funds not go to organizations labeled as “promoting abortion,” which allegedly also affects funding for contraception, maternal health, and the treatment of infectious diseases (para. 42). Citing the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the report recalls that states unable to realize the so-called right to sexual and reproductive health due to a lack of resources should seek international cooperation, and that states in a position to provide it should respond to such requests in good faith and in accordance with their international commitments (para. 43).

This passage of the report presents as a human rights violation what is in fact a sovereign political and budgetary decision of the donor state regarding the conditions under which it provides development aid. No binding international obligation requires a state to fund organizations involved in promoting or providing abortion services abroad. The decision to make aid conditional on not promoting abortion falls fully within the bounds of the donor state’s sovereignty and its right to shape its own foreign policy in accordance with its own system of values.

“Promising practices”: who was praised and who was left out

Chapter III of the report (paras. 44–55) presents four anonymized country examples as “promising practices.” The “Latin American country” described introduced a statutory reproductive health program in 2003 and mandatory comprehensive sexuality education in all schools in 2006, and in 2014 amended its Civil Code to enable adolescents from the age of 13 to gain access to “health services” without parental consent, including contraception, legal abortion, and mental healthcare. In 2020, that state legalized abortion, which the report links to the absence of recorded adolescent deaths from illegal abortion in 2021 (paras. 49–51); these data coincide in time with the legalization of abortion in Argentina in December 2020 (Law 27.610), although the report does not name the country. The “West African country” described launched a campaign against child marriage (2016) and a national strategy on so-called adolescent reproductive health (2018), and in 2021 its parliament expanded the legal grounds for abortion, adopting—according to the report—one of the most “progressive” legal frameworks in the region (paras. 52–53), which coincides in time with Benin’s 2021 legal amendment.

At the same time, in the “country in South-East Asia,” a 2016 law and a strategy built on five pillars (school-based education, engagement with families and communities, adolescent-friendly health services, social protection for pregnant adolescents, and data collection) led to a decline in the birth rate among adolescent girls aged 15–19 from 53.4 to 18 per 1,000 within a decade. Significantly, the reason for this success was none of the changes advocated in the report—the decriminalization of abortion, the abolition of parental consent, or the promotion of content on “gender and power” in schools. Elements of the description point to Thailand’s 2016 Act for Prevention and Solution of the Adolescent Pregnancy Problem. The same was true of the British (English) strategy of 1999–2010, cited in paras. 54–55, which led to a 72% decline in the adolescent birth rate between 1998 and 2021 and was not built around expanding the legal availability of abortion. A comparison of these four examples thus shows that the most spectacular and statistically documented results—the Thai and the British—were achieved without the elements that are most controversial from the standpoint of parental rights and the protection of unborn life, and yet the report presents the decriminalization of abortion and the removal of parental consent as universally recommended measures, regardless of the national context.

An ideological agenda under the guise of health protection

The report points to phenomena with serious health and social consequences. The data it cites—640 million women and girls married before reaching adulthood and more than 370 million victims of rape or sexual assault before the age of 18—leave no doubt in this regard. Combating child marriage, prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence against minors, and protecting the right of pregnant adolescents to continue their education are goals that deserve the full support of UN member states, including Poland.

The document, however, uses this undisputed diagnosis as a justification for a package of recommendations that go far beyond treaty consensus: the decriminalization of abortion for minors, the abolition of parental consent to medical decisions concerning their children, and mandatory permissive sex education, while at the same time stigmatizing as “prejudicial” educational models based, for example, on sexual abstinence. Meanwhile, the country examples cited in the report itself as the most effective prove that reducing adolescent pregnancy can be achieved by methods that require neither the decriminalization of abortion nor depriving parents of their right to share in decisions about their own children’s health.

The report of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights describes a problem whose existence no reasonable person denies. What is troubling, however, is the way in which this undeniable harm is exploited to smuggle in a far-reaching package of ideological demands. The very examples of states cited in the report refute the claim that such measures are necessary, since the countries that achieved the largest and best-documented decline in adolescent pregnancy did so through education, social support, and work with families—not by depriving parents of a say in matters concerning the life and health of their children. UN member states, including Poland, should be guided above all by those conclusions of the report that genuinely serve the protection of girls.

Julia Książek – analyst at the Ordo Iuris Center for International Law

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Source of cover photo: iStock