The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has raised the alarm about falling fertility rates worldwide, highlighting the many barriers faced by people who want to have children.
In a new report, The Real Fertility Crisis, UNFPA argues that declining birth rates are not aways the result of diminished desire for children, but rather a lack of real choice, driven by economic pressures, gender inequality, and inadequate support for parenting. Yet the UN agency fails to acknowledge the significant role it played for decades in promoting anti-natalist policies.
The report, based on a survey across 14 countries, shows that nearly 20pc of adults will not have their desired number of children, most often due to financial insecurity, job instability, expensive housing, and unequal caregiving burdens. Respondents also cited fears related to climate change, economic instability, and future crises as discouraging factors.
While many governments are nowadays implementing pronatalist incentives, the UNFPA claims that such approaches are often ineffective and dangerous to “reproductive rights”. “Measures that may seem harmless, such as financial ‘incentives’ for larger or smaller families, can indirectly lead to constraints on reproductive choice by increasing men’s and women’s vulnerability to coercion from partners, families or in-laws”, the report claims.
Instead, it advocates expanding what it calls “reproductive agency” through supportive measures such as affordable housing, childcare, paid parental leave, accessible fertility treatments (IVF), and shared responsibilities among parents.
Although it is true that many couples have fewer children than they would like, and many individuals never find a partner or start a family, the report fails to acknowledge another important element in the decline of fertility rates: the damaging legacy of population control policies including the widespread promotion of abortion and sterilisation, policies historically central to the UNFPA’s mission.
UNFPA was founded on the belief that unchecked population growth, particularly in poorer nations, was a key driver of poverty and environmental degradation. It became the principal agency in the global population control movement and endorsed coercive reproductive policies, including China’s one-child programme and India’s mass sterilisation campaigns under Indira Gandhi.
Columbia University historian, Matthew Connelly, writes in his book Fatal Misconception:
“Poor countries were pressed to accept population programs and rich countries were expected to pay for them. A majority finally agreed to create a United Nations Fund for Population Activities. Lobbyists and UN officials worked behind the scenes to shield it from government oversight or at least ensure that it could funnel money to NGOs, which operated even more independently. When some states openly accused proponents of neocolonialism, powerful aid agencies like USAID and the World Bank convinced them to reconsider.” (p. 379)
After the 1994 Cairo Conference, the UNFPA rebranded its mission using the language of human rights, focusing on “reproductive rights”, as it can be notice also in this last report, but according to Connelly, the underlying agenda remained the same: controlling fertility, especially in the developing world.
In light of this history, UNFPA’s current concern about falling fertility appears deeply paradoxical. Having spent decades trying to reduce birth rates by targeting poorer populations, it now expresses alarm over the very consequences of those efforts.
