The UN Population Fund’s Dirty Little Secret

by Stefano Gennarini: Even after decades of human rights abuses from coercive population control, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), continues to emphasize population control and to impose population control targets on countries all around the world.

The one-billion-dollar agency backed by Nordic countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, says its mission is to help women make their own choices when it comes to motherhood. But its programming is designed almost exclusively to steer women to preventing or ending motherhood through contraception and abortion.

The population control bias is plain in the latest iteration of UNFPA’s flagship annual State of the World’s Population. The report, titled “Unfinished Business: The Pursuit of Rights and Choices for All”, was released early this year in order to mark UNFPA’s fiftieth anniversary and influence a UNFPA conference in Nairobi this November.

The UNFPA report tells the story of the population control and family planning movement without ever distancing UNFPA from population control. It glosses over the many million women who were forcibly sterilized or forced to abort their children as a direct result of UNFPA’s work.

The report merely notes that international policy has moved from a “target” approach to population control to one based on women’s “empowerment.” If that were true, it would indeed be a good thing. But so long as UNFPA promotes contraceptive use targets and women don’t have the option of a safe pregnancy and delivery, UNFPA’s promises of choice ring hollow.

Over 60% of UNFPA’s annual programming expenses are for contraception. Less than 20% are dedicated to improving maternal health. UNFPA actually advocates that governments should spend more money on contraception because it is cheaper than making pregnancy and childbirth safe for mothers and their children with maternal health programming.

And here is where it really gets dirty.

All that money isn’t actually going towards making contraception more available or accessible. As UNFPA plainly admits, contraception is already widely available. Less than 2% of married women in poor countries say they lack access to contraception, according to USAID surveys. This level of market saturation has remained constant for nearly 20 years, despite an eightfold increase in international aid for population policies.

The main thrust of investments in family planning are instead used to attempt to convince women who, according to surveys originally designed by UNFPA, don’t want to use contraception, or who object to it on moral and health grounds, to use it nevertheless. In plain terms, internationally backed family planning programs are propaganda campaigns.

Nowhere is this more visible than the target on “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” designed by UNFPA to measure progress on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The UNFPA target effectively amounts to a “contraceptive use” quota for countries. Countries that have less than near one-hundred percent contraceptive use are targeted for more family planning propaganda. Ironically, these are the same countries where women themselves say they don’t lack access to contraception.

Alongside the family planning propaganda, UNFPA also promotes homosexual and transgender ideology, harmful comprehensive sexuality education for children, and access to contraception and abortion for girls as young as 10 without parental consent, and other controversial policies under the umbrella of “gender equality.” The report openly praises the sexual revolution and welcomes homosexual/trans ideology, and it includes Roe v. Wade as a landmark event in population policies .
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Stefano Gennarini is the Vice President for the Center of Legal Studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam). He represents C-Fam at UN headquarters in New York and researches and writes on international law and policy for C-Fam, advising UN delegations and liaising with pro-family organization around the world. Stefano earned a Juris Doctor from Notre Dame Law School in Indiana in 2011 and was a Blackstone Legal Fellow in 2009.

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