Downplaying reality: is the UN population fund forgetting population growth and family planning?

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The global population is projected by the UN Population Division to continue growing by over 2 billion, from 8.1 in 2024 to 10.3 in 2084, aggravating climate change and biodiversity loss, raising risks of poverty and starvation, and impairing reproductive health in many developing countries, especially in Africa. OBJECTIVE: Evaluation of the population policy of a major international actor in reproductive health, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and presentation of alternative and complementary policy addressing population growth, high fertility rates and unmet need for family planning in African and other countries. ARGUMENT: Original research and reviews show that family planning (FP) programs help reduce unsustainably high fertility and population growth. Historically birth control has seen grave mistakes, but most FP programs were voluntary and successful. Yet the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) leadership criticizes such programs, avoids emphasizing the need for fertility decline in Africa and elsewhere, and averts important facts about population growth. Instead, the leadership assumes that sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) fully solve related problems. While SRHR contributes to public health, voluntary FP programs in several African countries with serious undernourishment have helped increase contraceptive use and slow population growth. Many African countries face problems from strong population growth and wish to lower fertility by family planning. The US government has now cut most of its previously large international aid, with tragic health consequences. The new situation should encourage African and other high-fertility countries to invest in own population programs that reduce dependency on uncertain foreign donors. CONCLUSION: Voluntary family planning programs can increase contraceptive use, slow population growth, and improve the life of children, women and men. UNFPA leadership should endorse such FP programs and, in particular, re-adopt its historic mandate of improving human welfare by ameliorating rapid population growth.