NEW U.N. CONFERENCE TO PROMOTE POPULATION CONTROL

BANGKOK, Mar 26 (LSN) – On Tuesday, high-level government officials and representatives of non- governmental organizations from more than 30 Asia-Pacific countries began a four-day meeting promoting population control entitled, the Bangkok Conference.  Considering that by “reproductive health” the UN usually refers to abortion, the first speaker Mr. Bhichai Rattakul, Deputy Prime Minister of the Royal Thai Government made an ominous statement. “By focusing more on people, our governments are moving away from the narrow concerns of achieving impersonal ‘birth control targets’ towards the more positive and broader target-free ‘family planning and reproductive health’ considerations,” he said.  Keynote speaker, Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA),  addressed the meeting noting that the current conference is to focus on implementation of the Programme of Action adopted by the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) and the Bali Declaration adopted by the Fourth Asian and Pacific Population Conference (Bali, 1992). This conference, organized jointly by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and UNFPA is the first in a series of regional United Nations meetings to be organized around the world in preparation for a “Cairo Plus Five” conference, scheduled to be convened in 1999.