News

By Patrick B. Craine

LONDON, England, December 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Leading up to this month's conference on “climate change” in Copenhagen, Denmark, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) issued their annual State of World Population 2009 report, in which they called for reducing population in the interest of the environment.  The report is further confirmation of the claims made by pro-life leaders that the current environmentalist effort is being used to advance an anti-life agenda.

“Rapid population growth and industrialization have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions,” states UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid.  “We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster.”

The UNFPA report, entitled Facing a Changing World: Women, Population, and Climate, was released on November 18th, only weeks prior to the worldwide gathering in Copenhagen.  According to C-FAM's Piero A. Tozzi, the UNFPA used the report to connect current concerns over climate with the organization's focus on “reproductive rights.”

“Critics see the report as a thinly-veiled attempt to harness popular environmental concerns in service of population control,” Tozzi stated.

Achieving “universal access to reproductive health,” states the report, “would help achieve health and development objectives while also contributing to declines in fertility, which would in turn help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run” (9).

Tozzi points out that the report gives a “favorable citation” to Obama's science czar, John Holdren, which critics, he says, have seen “as signaling openness to coercive measures.”  Holdren is a self-described “neo-Malthusian,” who has expressed openness to radical population control policies, such as forced abortion and mixing sterilizing agents into drinking water.

Nevertheless, the report explicitly criticizes government-imposed population control, calling instead for greater “access” to “reproductive health” services, which they say ultimately leads to lower fertility rates.

Population control, the report says, “in the sense of Government edicts and targets on fertility levels, has no ethical place in contemporary rights-based policymaking” (67).  They advocate, on the other hand, policies that allow women to “decide for themselves if and when to have children and to do so in good health.”

“Demographic research has demonstrated for decades that when women and their partners can take advantage of client-focused family planning services, fertility falls,” it states.

The UNFPA's version of allowing women to “decide for themselves,” however, would seem to involve indoctrination into their abortive and contraceptive mentality.  The report notes that such “family planning” services are especially successful at reducing fertility when combined with “education for girls.”

Indeed, in June, the UNFPA released a new document along with UNESCO calling for explicit sexual education, which would deal with sex, “reproductive,” and “gender” issues, for all the world's children over five years old.  The document purported to take a “rights-based approach,” including “sexual and reproductive rights,” and the “right and access to safe abortion.”

The report notes that the connection between climate and population have been raised leading up to Copenhagen, pointing specifically to a proposal from the European Union “that population trends be among the factors that should be taken into consideration when setting greenhouse-gas mitigation targets” (20).

Population control has, in fact, become a key issue at the Copenhagen conference, after delegates from China raised the issue.  According to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the country's National Population and Family Planning Commission, “Population and climate change are intertwined, but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming.”

The UNFPA has, in fact, been complicit in China's population control regime.  New evidence released this summer documented the continuing coercive practices taking place in the UNFPA's six Chinese “model counties,” which include forced abortions and arrests of pregnant women.

See the UNFPA's State of World Population 2009 report.

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

New On-the-Ground Investigations Confirm UNFPA Complicity in China's Coercive Population Policy

Copenhagen: China pushing Population Control as the Final Solution

UNESCO/UNFPA Report calls for Explicit Sex Ed for All World's Children over Five