Population Controllers and the New UN Housing Conference

By | April 16, 2015

NAIROBI, April 17 (C-Fam) Negotiators met this week in Nairobi, Kenya to hammer out the draft of a document for a global agreement on housing and urban development – UN HABITAT III. Wherever growth in populations are at their highest, so is the concentration of population control advocates pushing their agenda and specific policies.

In 1996, UN Habitat II held in Istanbul, Turkey focused on abortion rights. Pro-family advocates succeeded in ensuring a mostly positive declaration. Our job is to accomplish the same, when Habitat III’s declaration will be completed next year in Ecuador.

For the past two days governments of developing countries acknowledged that the migration of millions of people to cities looking for work has created great challenges. In 1990, 43% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Today, this figure has risen to 50% – 3.8 billion people with 25%, 900 million – living in slums.

For the urban poor their needs are basic – clean water, electricity, employment to feed their families and a safe place for their children to play. Many community leaders that have led successful initiatives to make life better for the urban poor came to the prepcom to inform member states and UN-Habitat officials.

“If the goals of the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] and Habitat III are to be accomplished the means of implementation must be defined by the people in the communities themselves” said a woman from Kenya working to alleviate poverty in her community. Her statement was met with an outburst of applause in a packed room of community activists who shared best practices being implemented in their communities. Activists implored the UN-Habitat official to provide a forum where bureau members drafting the Habitat III resolution could meet with them.

The success of Habitat III – “The New Urban Agenda” will require western countries to reprioritize development assistance. Currently $7 billion annually is directed to family planning programs by western countries, rich philanthropists and UN agencies. In FY2014 the US allocated just under $700 million for family planning – for economic development for infrastructure – also $700 million. This failure to prioritize the living conditions of the poor is due in large part to the powerful lobbying of population control and reproductive rights advocates.

While this discussion in Nairobi takes place on how to provide the poor with affordable housing, clean water to eliminate disease and safe communities – a discussion also ensues at the UN in New York where population control and reproductive rights groups are pushing for even more funding that will siphon limited funding from real development to more population reduction programs.

This burgeoning foreign budget for family planning has led to numerous clinics run by abortion organizations throughout Nairobi and other sub-Saharan African cities, with frequent radio ads targeting young women to increase long acting contraception use.

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