UN Blueprint for Youth Still Stuck in 1995

By C-FAM Staff | 2011

NEW YORK, July 21 (C-FAM) Next week the UN General Assembly will adopt a document for youth. The blueprint they are using was crafted in the same years that pro-life and abortion advocates clashed over reproductive issues at conferences in Cairo and Beijing. The World Program of Action for Youth absorbed the consequences of those conferences, and today still echoes the zeitgeist of 1995.

A new research report issued by C-FAM (publisher of the Friday Fax) outlines how the World Program of Action for Youth (WPAY) may be out of step and even failing today’s generation of young people by clinging to development issues that have either evolved or become obsolete over time. The report asserts that “there is now better evidence showing which strategies are effective and which are not among the various concerns that WPAY addresses, such as the treatment of HIV/AIDS.”

Among the issues addressed in the research report is global fertility decline. Lowering global fertility rates has long been a goal of UN agencies, which is also reflected in the WPAY document. Many international development experts at the UN believe that fewer births are the key to lifting poor countries out of poverty.

A growing number of demographers, however, are warning development experts that low birth rates create fewer workers in the long run to provide for elderly as well as child dependents. The report highlights UN population prospects data that estimates “today, 42 per cent of the world population lives in low-fertility countries, that is, countries where women are not having enough children to ensure that, on average, each woman is replaced by a daughter who survives to the age of procreation.”

When WPAY was drafted the HIV/AIDS epidemic was still a relatively new crisis, and international aid agencies were desperate to find solutions to stem the tide of new infections. Aid experts now recognize that instead of heavy condom programming (that has been favored by international organizations), the best practices to prevent new infections of HIV/AIDS promote sexual partner reductions through abstinence and fidelity in marriage.

“The WPAY document translates policies from the Beijing Platform of Action and ICPD, such as access to contraceptives and abortion that were never meant for minors, to apply to adolescents,” states the research report. During the development and population conferences of the 1990s sexual “rights” became a major debate as radical feminist groups attempted to insert language into the conference documents that would guarantee abortions and contraceptives worldwide.

The sexual rights debate trickled into WPAY negotiations, where a number of countries were incensed regarding disputed sections of the document and filed official objections. At the time, countries found language on sexual health and education disrespectful of their nations’ traditions and cultures. The C-FAM report states, “The WPAY document should give voice to all the needs of young people, in appropriate priority, and not just the needs that have been emphasized by well-funded interest groups.”

WPAY is referenced many times in the youth conference document that has been under heavy negotiations this summer in preparation for the UN high-level meeting on youth taking place next week.

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