Q: should the United Nations support more family-planning services for poor countries?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2001 | by Werner Fornos, | Steven W. Mosher

YES: Population pressures lead to poverty, health, environmental and security concerns.

I do not believe the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) should support "more population control" nor do I believe that the fund ever has supported "population control." Control implies domination, force and coercion, all of which I categorically and unequivocally oppose. It should be clearly understood that nations receiving aid from UNFPA must request assistance and programs that the fund supports and must adhere strictly to the principles of voluntarism.

The fund does not have the fight, much less the mandate, to "control" the population of any country. If it did, I doubt the U.S. Congress would have appropriated during the last 32 years $612.3 million of the $4.5 billion that UNFPA has provided for population and family-planning program assistance to virtually all developing nations. Nor do I believe that in 1999, when the United States did not contribute to UNFPA, that the 10 leading donors to the fund -- Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Canada -- would have supported or condoned forced or coercive "population control."

The programs UNFPA does support, including access to reproductive health and family planning, represent the antithesis of force and coercion. There are an estimated 350 million women in the poorest countries of the world who either did not want their last child, do not want another child or want to space their pregnancies, but they lack access to information, affordable means and services to determine the size and spacing of their families. Credible demographic and health surveys indicate that 120 million of these women would use modern contraception immediately were it available and accessible.

Denying these women their internationally recognized right to family planning amounts to forcing them to become pregnant. Such denial can no longer be ascribed to ignorance or unintentional neglect; it is utterly shameful and blatantly reprehensible -- inaction that is unworthy of any society that at the dawn of the 21st century considers itself to be progressive or even moderately civilized.

Those who persist in spreading the myth that UNFPA is engaged in "population control" fall into two categories: the misinformed and the ideological ax-grinders who disseminate malicious propaganda with a heavy hand and a cold heart.

Ideologues who turn their backs on 350 million women with an unmet need for voluntary family planning insist that population growth is no longer an issue of global magnitude; some would have us believe that rapid human growth never was a problem.

Those who contend that the "population bomb" has been defused offer as evidence the fact that since the 1980s world population growth has slowed from nearly 90 million people added to the world each year to 77 million. This indeed is an extraordinary accomplishment -- one attributable to a combination of factors, including improved health services resulting in people living longer, increased marriage age in some parts of the world and rising contraceptive prevalence. A point often overlooked, however, is that the world is demographically divided.

More than 4 billion of the world's 6.1 billion people live in the developing world, countries beset by poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, unemployment, environmental degradation and social disintegration. Among the inhabitants of developing countries are 3 billion people -- one-half the population of the entire world -- who subsist on the equivalent of $2 or less a day; 1.5 billion people who lack safe drinking water or adequate sanitation; 800 million who are chronically malnourished; and 600 million who lack adequate shelter. An estimated 97 percent of population growth in the foreseeable future will occur in these same countries and regions.

In the developing world, where life for far too many amounts to a day-to-day struggle for survival, every year some 514,000 women die of complications from pregnancy and abortion. And every year 8 million infants die, many because of malnutrition or preventable diseases.

While there is enough food grown today to feed the entire world, it is not always grown within accessible proximity to the people who need it. According to the median projection of the U.N. Population Division, by midcentury world population will increase from today's 6.1 billion to 9.3 billion There are serious concerns as to whether agricultural production can increase by 50 percent within this time frame to accommodate the additional mouths that must be fed.

In addition to poverty, health and environmental considerations, rapid population growth has an impact on national security. This concern has intensified enormously since the horrific hijacked airliner attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

According to a report released 15 years ago by a task force headed by then-U.S. vice president George H.W. Bush: "Fully 60 percent of the Third World population is under 20 years of age, half are 15 years or less. These population pressures, when coupled with economic and political frustration, help form a large pool of potential terrorists." Virtually every one of the hijackers involved in the Washington and New York City attacks was under the age of 20 when that report was written.