Dear Colleague:

The United Nations Population Fund's latest State of World Population
report concerns itself more with feminist and pro-condom ideology than
with improving the lives of Third World people.  Surprised?

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
21 October 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 41


Mostly the Same, But UNFPA Discovers Fatherlessness
By Joseph A. D'Agostino


The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) this month released its State
of World Population 2005 report, titled The Promise of Equality: Gender
Equity, Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals, and
regular readers of this space will not be surprised to learn that we think
it mostly misses the point, yet again.

UNFPA focuses on its own two pet points: First and foremost, the extensive
social re-engineering project that is literally and obviously destroying
most of the world's non-Muslim societies, and second, condoms.  Reading
the report, one gets the impression that absolute universal gender
equality (by which they mean sameness) and absolute universal condom usage
will inaugurate a blissful utopia, free of most social ills about which it
is currently fashionable to complain among international bureaucrats.
This utopia would be free of HIV infection in particular.

In introducing its report, UNFPA implicitly acknowledges the self-image of
United Nations petite grandees as expense account-bearing
philosopher-kings, and the language they use is worthy of those
philosopher-kin of theirs sitting on our own Supreme Court.  UNFPA poses a
series of questions about improving the lives of poor people and then
claims, "For perhaps the first time in history, questions such as these
are not simply rhetorical.  They have answers: Answers that go to the very
heart of what it means to be a woman or a man, wealthy or poor."

Yes, one of UNFPA's regularly released reports is here to tell you, amidst
statistics on adolescent marriage and sexually transmitted disease rates,
about the fundamental questions of manhood and womanhood, and what it
means to be one or the other (or both or neither, I suppose, in this age
of liberation).  And it certainly does, tediously promoting the complete
removal of any differences whatsoever between men and women as the
solution to everything from war to the AIDS epidemic to poor sanitation to
the excessive, in their eyes, tendency of the Third World masses to have
children.

UNFPA and other agencies continue to struggle and fail, as they have for
two decades, to contain the spread of HIV, especially where it has
exploded the most ruinously, sub-Saharan Africa.  The more they struggle
and fail, the more funding they receive, and the more funding they
receive, the more they promote the same failed approaches.

UNFPA makes a big deal of human rights, especially the rights of women,
yet continues to subsidize Communist China's coercive one-child
policy--which, according to Time in its September 19 issue, continues to
generate the physically forced abortion and sterilization of women by the
thousands, and uses other coervice methods to keep millions of other
would-be mothers of large families from realizing their dreams.  UNFPA's
past rhetorical support and current financial support for this policy
makes a mockery of statements like these: "Reproductive rights are central
to human rights, especially the human rights of women.  They derive from
the recognition of the basic right of all individuals and couples to make
decisions about reproduction free of discrimination, coercion or violence.
 They include the right to the highest standard of health and the right to
determine the number, timing and spacing of children."  In China, it's
official government policy that Chinese women may have only one or two
children in their lifetimes.

However, UNFPA is right about the importance of maternal health as a
global issue.  Just as with child mortality, there are a few simple,
inexpensive measures that would dramatically decrease maternal deaths and
injuries related to childbearing.  Such deaths have been virtually
eliminated in the First World.

"Virtually all-99%-of maternal deaths occur in developing countries," says
UNFPA.  "The lives of most of these women-and those of their
newborns-could be saved through emergency care readily available to
wealthier women.  Every minute a woman dies from the complications of
childbirth or pregnancy, and another 20 are seriously injured or disabled.
 And when a mother dies giving birth, her infant's chances of survival
plummet.  Motherless newborns are three to 10 times more likely to die
than others."

But what does UNFPA emphasize to prevent maternal death?  Preventing
maternity.  "Preventing unintended pregnancies through access to family
planning could avert 20 to 35% of maternal deaths, saving the lives of
more than 100,000 mothers each year."
In a world of rapidly imploding birthrates and aging populations, even in
most Third World countries, due in large part to the gender-equal goal of
liberating women from child-rearing, UNFPA is still very intent on
population control.  In its baloney passages exaggerating the
effectiveness of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, it likes to
mention the negation of children as a side benefit of condom use.

The report even complains about societies in which "women are expected to
have children."  UNFPA should investigate the longetivity of societies in
which women are not expected to have children and issue a report.

The report never condemns immoral or unnatural behavior as the primary
cause of the spread of HIV even among women, who now make up the majority
of new cases.  But its own statistics show that most women may be getting
the disease from their own immoral behavior or from that of their
husbands.  Consider:

"In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 60 to 80% of HIV-positive women have
been infected by their husbands-their sole partner."
"In Cambodia, 42% of all new HIV infections occur from transmission by
husbands to their wives.  One third of new infections are to the babies of
these women."
"Studies of pregnant teens in countries of sub-Saharan Africa revealed
that 73% of the girls interviewed had sexual partners who were over age
30.  In Haiti, one study found that one third of adolescent girls reported
entering sexual relationships out of economic necessity.  Of these, 95%
had children by several fathers, placing both the women and their infants
at higher risk of HIV."

How is UNFPA's mania for forcing traditional cultures to adopt Western
notions of gender equality going to end this behavior?  Only the adoption
of traditional morality can do it.  As for equality for women, when men
view women as equals, they exploit them as they would other men.  It's
liberated, after all.  It is the old-fashioned Christian or
Christian-derived protective attitude, an essentially unequal one, that
has to be fostered in men so they will not expose their wives and other
women to a fatal disease.

Speaking of the return to tradition, the renewed interest among social
scientists in the possibility that fathers might be significant has
apparently spread as far as UNFPA.  Says this amusing passage, "Supportive
fathers can play a large role in the love, care and nurturance of their
children.  Often they are the primary providers for their families.
Researchers have begun analyzing the links between paternal absence and
poverty.  Children's psychological, social and cognitive development can
suffer from paternal abandonment and lack of affective and material
support."

So UN-recognized scientists have finally gotten around to studying the
connection between fatherlessness and poverty?  We're glad.  Next, they
should look into why AIDS keeps spreading rapidly in the poor, sexually
degenerate societies to which UNFPA ships mountains of condoms.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.


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