Abstract
Rather pragmatic considerations, i.e., to reduce high levels of mortality and particularly fertility, led to the first modern population programs. It could be argued that these interventions, which were implemented after World War II, were the result of a kind of de facto consensus in favor of such global endeavors. At the time, both mortality and fertility levels were deemed to be too high in developing countries. Curbing fertility levels was considered important and urgent, because it was assumed that such a reduction would improve socioeconomic outcomes.
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Notes
- 1.
The Population Crisis Committee (PCC), created in 1965, played a key role under the leadership of the Major-General William H. Draper, Jr. (1894–1974). The PCC helped get international family planning programs started. It was also most influential in the creation of key population institutions, like UNFPA, and helped establish an Office of Population within USAID. It also raised private funds for the IPPF.
- 2.
Later, such cash incentives would be banned by some agencies, e.g., USAID, as being coercive. Even monetary incentives for family planning providers would be prohibited, for instance under Results-Based Financing (RBF) schemes.
- 3.
However, the WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research and its longstanding Human Reproduction Program currently carry out important work in the area of contraceptive research and normative guidance for family planning and reproductive health programs.
- 4.
Initially, UNFPA was set up as a division of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and managed by the UNDP Governing Council. The first name of UNFPA was United Nations Fund for Population Activities.
- 5.
GTZ was renamed Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in January 2011.
- 6.
In addition, global health initiatives, health sector reforms, and new financial modalities from donors and lenders further threatened the reproductive health agenda; see Yazbeck (2004).
- 7.
Ironically, soon after the Cairo conference, the Bank changed the acronym PHN, which stands for population, health and nutrition, into HNP, thereby demoting population issues.
- 8.
The same authors point to the lobbying exerted in the early 1950s by the Holy See, with the support of some countries (e.g., Belgium, Italy, and Lebanon), to ensure that family planning would not be included in the mandate of the World Health Organization (Ibid.: 58–66).
- 9.
Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) was the US 40th President (1981–1989).
- 10.
In its 16 chapters, the extensive ICPD Report covered a wide range of topics, inter alia population growth and structure, mortality, fertility, population distribution, international migration, education, technology, research, and international cooperation. Unfortunately, public and media attention focused almost exclusively on Chapter VII, which dealt with reproductive rights and reproductive health, and Chapter VIII, which covered abortion (paragraph 8.25). As a result, the world lost sight from the global perspective offered by this comprehensive document.
- 11.
A similar conference is planned for 2012.
- 12.
European countries, which wanted to fund reproductive health, became major donors of UNFPA, which explains in part why this agency somewhat lost sight of family planning goals.
- 13.
Sometimes, declarations endorsed internationally by governments are adopted with considerable delays by their national parliaments. For example, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, which was adopted in July 2003 by the African Union in the form of a protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, was signed by 46 countries but was ratified by only 28 countries as of July 2010. The “Maputo Protocol” guarantees comprehensive rights to women including the right to take part in the political process, to achieve social and political equality with men, to control their reproductive health, and to end female genital mutilation.
- 14.
With the benefit of hindsight, one may regret that population and family planning professionals at the time did not denounce sufficiently the abuses of the programs in India and China.
- 15.
The new United Nations projections (the 2010 Revision) issued in 2011 use the median trajectory of the probabilistic projection of the TFR to inform the assumptions for the medium fertility variant. However, mortality is still projected deterministically. Additionally, the projections run until 2100 instead of 2050 as in the previous UN projections revisions.
- 16.
In its 2008 population projections (Medium variant), the UN Population Division assumes a global average TFR of 2.02 children per woman for the period 2045–2050; see United Nations (2009d): 10.
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May, J.F. (2012). Internationalization of Population Issues. In: World Population Policies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2837-0_5
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