(LifeSiteNews) — The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), born in the dark fear of exploding human numbers, has always been driven by a desire to reduce human numbers. Its annual reports have typically been focused on population growth, pushing abortion, sterilization, and contraception to combat “overpopulation.”
But now that the world’s population is leveling off, the populations of dozens of countries are in freefall, and it has lost U.S. funding, the agency trying to reinvent itself.
In its latest report, State of the World Population 2025, it spills much ink trying to convince its donors that “the real fertility crisis” is not falling birth rates but a “lack of reproductive agency.”
By this it means that young women, from the time they hit puberty (the report says “as early as 10”), should be freed of all societal controls when it comes to sex. Instead, the UNFPA says, they should be given access to sex education, contraception, sterilization, abortion, and even infertility care, if they so desire, so they can make their own “informed, voluntary choices about reproduction.”
Now sensible people will question whether 12-year-old girls should be having sex at all rather than encouraging these children to become sexually active under the pretense that they are capable of making “informed, voluntary choices about reproduction.”
As for how universal “reproductive agency” and “bodily autonomy” is to be achieved, the UNFPA lists:
- Universal sex education to ensure “informed decision-making.”
- Universal access to every possible kind of contraceptive devices, from condoms to the morning after pill. This is necessary, the UNFPA claims, to prevent the “unintended pregnancies that affect 1 in 3 adults globally.” It fails to mention that it counts all pregnancies that are not specifically planned as “unintended,” thus inflating the numbers.
- Universal access to abortion services, which is touted as a critical component of reproductive autonomy. Here the UNFPA repeats its false claim that pro-life laws protecting the unborn are responsible for high rates of maternal mortality because they lead to unsafe abortions. Which is a lot like saying that guardrails on a highway cause car crashes because they stop people from driving off cliffs in style.
- Free In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) for all. UNFPA stresses India in particular, “where 27.5 million couples face infertility but public services are limited.”
But the UNFPA is not content to stop there. It wants to go full Cultural Marxist, proposing:
- Contraception, sterilization, abortion and IVF should be provided to “marginalized groups, such as unmarried individuals and LGBTQIA+ persons.”
- The elimination of “patriarchal norms that limit reproductive choices.” In other words, traditional marriage is out, while every possible sexual and reproductive arrangement from gay marriage to polygamy is in.
- Governments should guarantee “affordable housing and decent work” to their populations, which is a backhanded endorsement of socialisms’ “free everything.”
- Governments should work to mitigate “climate change.” Now it is true that the fears created by the myth of Global Warming have caused many young people to choose to remain childless. But the solution is to end the fear-mongering, not to destroy the world’s economy by banning fossil fuels.
Policies that the UNFPA rejects are equally revealing. After decades of insisting that governments must have family planning policies in place to reduce population growth — even endorsing China’s coercive anti-natalist one-child policy — it now stridently opposes efforts by governments to raise the birth rate.
It warns against baby bonuses, for example, calling these “coercive pro-natalist policies.”
It also condemns efforts by governments to achieve “fertility targets,” which it calls both ineffective and a potential violation of reproductive rights.
Here the anti-people animus of the UNFPA is on full display.
When governments were actively intervening in the fertility decisions of married couples to drive down the birth rate, the UN agency showered praise and free contraceptives on them.
Now that many governments are taking the opposite tack, the UNFPA has suddenly become a human rights watchdog, warning about imagined violations of reproductive rights, criticizing the efforts of countries like the U.S. to raise its birth rate to maintain social welfare programs and care for its aging population.
The UNFPA’s solution to labor shortages caused by plummeting birth rates is, not surprisingly, mass immigration, ignoring the massive societal problems that such population transfers give rise to.
In sum, despite its new emphasis on “reproductive agency,” the UNFPA remains what it has always been: a radical anti-family, anti-natal organization, pushing not just abortion and contraception, but all manner of leftist causes on the world.
For all the UNFPA’s talk of reproductive rights, its leaders believe that unborn children have no rights, and that the planet would be better off with fewer people.
The U.S. is well quit of it.
Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute.
