Beware the next UNFPA Youth Forum

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | November 27, 2012

UNFPA expects 900 people at a youth forum scheduled for December 4-6 in Bali. It says the Indonesian Vice-President will open the event with UNFPA’s executive director. Of course, if you followed C-FAM coverage of the UNFPA Youth events in Mexico and New York in the last 2 years, you know that what was planned and the chaos materialized were at striking variance. The outcome document from the Mexico event was constructed behind closed doors with little input from the people gathered at the meeting, much less the world’s youth.

One thing remains the same. UNFPA claims that the outcome document from the Bali forum will have legitimacy in the eyes of UN member states–hardly a widely accepted view–and plans to deliver the document to the UN General Assembly for its blessing. According to IPS news, it plans to use it to prolong the UNFPA mandate past its expiration in 2015.  Critics would like to see the agency closed. Its original mandate to control global population has arguably been achieved since fertility rates have been plummeting all over the world. This would seem to be the reason UNFPA is focusing on youth–an effort to create new customers for the contraception market that funds the organization.

The main concern with such a forum is that UNFPA has wrongly inserted abortion and homosexual lifestyles into the youth forum in the past–then claimed that it somehow expresses the majority view of the world’s youth. It can be expected that those controversial issues will again be inserted into the outcome document put before the UN GA in 2014.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter