ANALYSIS: Are Days Numbered for the UN Population Establishment?

By

UN Commission on Population and Development

NEW YORK, May 10 (C-Fam) The thirtieth anniversary of the 1994 Cairo agreement on population was supposed to be an occasion of celebration for abortion and homosexual/trans groups, but it was not. More than anything else, it raised more questions about the continued relevance of the Cairo agenda.

Abortion and LGBT activists could not bring themselves to celebrate the anniversary of the Cairo agreement because their funding is being scrutinized. As countries are reaping the horrific consequences of sixty years of anti-natalist programs and propaganda, countries are calling into question the importance of future investment.

Seven out of the last ten sessions the UN Commission on Population and Development have failed to produce any agreement at all. This year they could only adopt a short declaration but only after it was purged of controversial elements. This is no accident. There are obvious systemic reasons for this.

First, the Western governments that promote sexual and reproductive health are intransigent on the topic of sovereignty. They want abortion and homosexual/trans issues to be international human rights, so they do not want any limiting language in UN agreements, especially language protecting the sovereign right of countries to decide these questions on their own. This creates a clash with developing countries, which for the most part, are quite traditional, and insist on sovereign prerogatives when it comes to sensitive social policy.

Second, no one doubts the meaning of “sexual and reproductive health” anymore. When the term was first introduced into UN policy thirty years ago with the Cairo agreement there was a lot of confusion as to what the terms meant. Today no one doubts it. The term is one of several euphemisms that Western governments use to promote abortion, homosexual/trans issues, sexual autonomy for children, and other controversial social policies. This makes traditional countries all the more insistent on respect for sovereignty in the field of population policies, thereby making the issue intractable.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, reality is catching up with the population control movement. More and more countries are awakening to the imminent threat of low fertility and aging in all societies. It is hard to justify population control when populations are dwindling. As a result, fewer and fewer countries, both donors and aid recipients, attach high importance to the outcome of the commission. In many ways they already see it as moot.

The Commission on Population was founded 57 years ago precisely to promote low fertility as the ultimate solution to poverty. When population control became politically incorrect in the 1990s the UN population establishment shifted their rhetoric to “sexual and reproductive health” and “gender empowerment” but the policies did not change, and funding grew exponentially. Currently, sexual and reproductive health, is the number one item on the global health agenda. No other issue receives more funding. But this is now under scrutiny like never before.

It may only be a matter of time before international policy starts promoting baby bonuses, marriage counseling, and stay at home moms. As soon as politicians can no longer escape the reality of plummeting fertility, these policies will be popular everywhere in the world.

For poor countries, slow population growth poses a humanitarian challenge. Developed countries in Europe, English speaking countries, and Japan, like to talk about healthy ageing, re-training for seniors to keep working past retirement age, and robotics and AI technology. They promise that public investments in these areas can help societies with aging populations deal with shrinking workforces, especially scarcity of health-care workers. Developing countries see this as a self-serving and heartless.

Technological solutions for aging are not widely seen as viable, and in any case, they are prohibitively expensive for most countries. More troubling still, the brightest and most enterprising minds of the global south are migrating to wealthy Western countries, leaving already impoverished countries drained of their most valuable resource, social capital.

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