UNFPA Report Frames “Unintended Pregnancy” as Global Crisis

By | April 7, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. April 8 (C-Fam) The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reports that nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended. This according to their new State of the World Population report.  UNFPA chief Natalia Kanem calls it a “global failure to uphold women and girls’ basic human rights.”

The 1968 outcome document of a human rights conference declared family planning a human right: “parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.”  The following year, UNFPA began operations with the goal of ensuring access to family planning around the world.

Over half a century later, knowledge of contraception methods is near-universal, and access to methods is close to universal as well.

How does UNFPA account for the enormous disconnection between intention and pregnancy?  “The biggest issue, by far, is the unmet need for contraception,” according to the new report. UNFPA has often used “unmet need” interchangeably with a lack of access, but this is inaccurate.  Based on surveys of women themselves, only a small percentage—about 5%—of “unmet need” is caused by a lack of access to family planning.

Instead, women cite concerns about side effects and health risks of various methods, express opposition to using them, or say they consider themselves at relatively low probability of becoming pregnant.  In most cases, the explanation for “unmet need” looks less like a human rights violation and more like women making decisions about their own bodies, a concept UNFPA strongly promotes.

The report also notes that contraceptives can fail, and cites a study from the UK attributing one in four abortions to contraceptive failure.

UNFPA acknowledges that not all “unintended” pregnancies and births are “unwanted,” and notes that data on “unwantedness” often fails to take into account people’s changing views in light of an unexpected pregnancy.

While pro-life organizations have long recognized that in some cases a pregnancy can pose a crisis for a woman or family, this is dependent on people’s specific circumstances and is not interchangeable with the intendedness of the pregnancy at the time of conception.

Much of UNFPA’s data focuses on developing countries.  In 2018, the State of World Population report drew special attention to the figure that 43% of pregnancies in the developing world were unplanned, while omitting the fact that in developed regions, the corresponding statistic was 46%, and the region with the lowest percentage of pregnancies unintended was Africa at 39%.

UNFPA claims that while the rate of unintended pregnancy has declined, the rate of abortion has not, which is attributed to women “exercising moderately more autonomy over their reproductive outcomes” through both contraception and abortion.

UNFPA also downplays the longstanding consensus at the UN that abortion laws are solely the domain of national governments: “While abortion access is principally governed through national law, human rights norms increasingly affect the scope of national legislation.”

That one should be compelled to continue with an undesired pregnancy “reflects the discriminatory notion that the worth of girls and women lies solely in their reproductive capacities,” according to the report.

In fact, UNFPA goes even further than that: “Every woman, and some people who do not identify as women, is at risk of an unintended pregnancy.”

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