UNFPA’s World Population Day Uses Scare Tactics to Promote Overpopulation
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by Colin Mason
July 9, 2008
Colin Mason is the media director of the Population Research Institute. Opinion and editorial articles like this one do not necessarily reflect the views of LifeNews.com.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has a long and painful history of coercive tactics. Since its inception in 1969, pro-lifers have decried its cultural insensitivity and unrelenting top-down logic that sees human beings as disposable commodities, and overpopulation as the world’s greatest looming threat.
Now, nearly 4 decades later, the UNFPA is announcing the 19th iteration of a secular holiday they like to call World Population Day. Slated for Friday, July 11, World Population Day marks a continuing effort on the part of the UNFPA to soften their message for the people who they are, in fact, targeting.
In other words, the UNFPA is trying to succeed where pro-lifers have always excelled: on human-level education. The problem is, the ingenuity of pro-lifers has always arisen from our relative lack of funds and aided by the basic "human-ness" of our message.
The UNFPA’s "grassroots campaign," on the other hand, is nothing more than another top-heavy attempt to forcibly reeducate people with an unnatural message — a message of death and infertility that flies in the face of fundamental human instincts.
"This year’s World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families," the World Population Day’s website proclaims. It is an attractive website, with a well-designed layout and classy color scheme that bespeaks taste and sophistication. World Population Day, it tells us, "encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real – especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as marginalized populations and young people."
Never mind that the UNFPA has worked alongside some of the world’s worst human rights offenders to marginalize women, children, and ethnic groups for the sake of curbing population growth.
"The only right that World Population Day advocates is the UNFPA’s right to decide who may have a child… and who gets sterilized or aborted."
"When people can plan their families, they can plan their lives," the site continues. "They can plan to beat poverty. They can plan on healthier mothers and children. They can plan to gain equality for women. Plan to support World Population Day this year!"
The web site offers a fully self-contained "resource kit" for World Population Day, replete with literature, ready-to-print posters, "fact sheets," and detailed instructional forms. Predictably enough, World Population Day is being pushed hardest in the nations which the UN sees as having the direst population issues. In the Philippines, for example, the UNFPA is hosting an essay-writing contest. In Pakistan, international website The News reports ominously that Pakistan’s Ministry of Population Welfare is "making elaborate arrangements to celebrate World Population Day on July 11, like other parts of the world, in a befitting manner."
This doesn’t sound like groundswell enthusiasm. This sounds like heavy-handed re-education, the Newspeak of the pro-abortion movement. The World Population Day promotion kit even comes complete with its own catchy mantras like "Plan to beat poverty! Plan to gain equality! Plan to beat maternal death!" People with genuine sentiment do not need to be told what to think and what to plan. They think it and plan it all by themselves.
In short, World Population Day doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the UNFPA. It is a New York City-based international organization run by image-conscious bureaucrats who know next to nothing about the state of affairs in the countries they purport to help. Especially in light of the world’s free-falling birthrates, the UNFPA’s efforts to control population through ham-handed "education" would be laughable, were it not so devastatingly serious.
In addition, the right of couples to plan their own families responsibly has long been recognized as a fundamental human right. The UNFPA, the supposed liberator of women and die-hard supporter of "reproductive rights," has consistently been one of the world’s worst offenders against this right. In its quest to reduce fertility, the UNFPA would gladly run roughshod over men, women, children, and families, replacing a couple’s private fertility decisions with the official UNFPA version of "responsibility."
This flies in the face of the natural dignity of human procreation, and most people and cultures reject such coercion. No amount of face-lifting will change the fact that the UNFPA will never enjoy the popular support that they covet so much; the "unmet need" that they parade so vigorously before the world stage. What they promote is too unnatural, too repulsive. This is why PRI has consistently urged the United States government to cut American funding to the UNFPA, and to date, our reasoning has made an impact: $235 million in American taxes has been denied this group.
The pro-life movement has always had the approval of the common man (or woman). And why shouldn’t we? Our movement is made up of common men, of people with human interests at heart and who work on a human scale. No amount of money, government strong-arming, or phony bureaucratic holidays can ever take that away from us.
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