By: Rebecca Brindza, Editor-ICN International
PART-2
USA/ISRAEL: Policymakers in the present day have grown increasingly aware of the “multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant.” (Steger, 2005).
Therefore, it is no surprise that within the globalized era, national policies have become deeply intertwined with global issues. This is echoed by the fact that developing states are increasingly susceptible to happenings in the global arena, and as a byproduct “have come to depend heavily on the international community for financial and technical assistance” (Zaei, 2014). It is within this context, that this paper will seek to analyze the changes in global governance relating to population control. It will do so by examining the historical evolution of global fertility polices, as well as global trends of access and use of contraceptive methods around the world.
1970-1990s: Global Failures that lead to Global Funding Initiatives
The decade surrounding the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest ushered in a new realm of international support for population control. Whereby, international involvement increased, attitudes changed and various multilateral development-funding initiatives were formed. In addition, “modern contraceptives had been further improved and were more widely available, thus facilitating the promotion of their use” (UN, 2003).
Despite the UN’s achievement in placing population control and family planning at the top of the international political agenda, direct implementation of said policies and programs had yet to unfold. Developing nations continued to struggle with taming their rapidly expanding populations well into the late 1960s, and began to adopt a more tolerant stance towards international population assistance. The influx in requests from developing nations for population assistance prompted several external organs of the UN, such as WHO, UNICEF, FAO, UNESCO, ILO and the World Bank, to enter the realm of family planning (UN, 2003). Thus by the end of the 1960s and with much financial support coming from the US, the UN had established the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (Yeates, 2014). Within a period of 2 years, the fund had received donor commitments from more than 50 states (UN, 2003).
Throughout 1971 to 1974, attitudes at the national and global levels turned from cautious and indirect to explicit and necessary as policy formation became the preferred method to combat population growth. The sixteenth session of the United Nations Population Commission concluded that in order for birth rates to reach replacement levels in the developing world, it was pertinent for states to draft county-specific initiatives. This prompted a significant decrease in the number of national governments opposing population policies, as well as the UN Secretariat to publish “a complete review of policies intended to affect fertility—including such controversial methods as abortion and sterilization” in 1972 (UN, 2003).
At the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest representatives discussed the rationale for family planning and discerned that international strategy should have explicit focus on development rather than population control. The result of this conference was the World Population Plan of Action (WPPA), a policy document that in addition to reiterating that family planning was a basic human right to be respected and upheld by all states, sought to encourage additional research on available methods of family planning. Yet as strategies that had come before, the WPPA failed “to provide any recommendation in favor of family planning and the provision of modern family planning methods” (UN, 2003). Moreover, the document shed light on the need to close the widening opinion gap between developed and developing states. While Western states clung to the assumption that “rapid population growth was a serious impediment to development,” developing states under the leadership of Algeria and Argentina professed that the “population problem was a consequence, not a cause, of underdevelopment, and that it could be solved by a new international economic order” (UN, 2003). Despite downfalls, the WPPA would solidify population growth as primary subset in national policies and assist the spread of international population assistance within the developing world (UN, 2003).
Yet against a backdrop of economic disarray, the 1980s developing world witnessed a considerable decline in global population growth and a significant increase in the endorsement of family planning programs and supply of modern forms of contraception (UN, 2003). For example, East Asia had jumped from just under 20% in 1960 to 75% in 1990. Latin American, South Asian, as well as the Middle East and North Africa also experienced significant increases in contraceptive prevalence (Tsui, 2001). Further questions on how to expand the volume of international cooperation and assistance for population policies and family planning programs, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, were brought to attention at the 1984 International Population Conference in Mexico City. The conference set out to revise the WPPA policy and introduced “references to urgency and universality, and the specific reference to the rights of individuals” (UN, 2003). In the following years, several Sub-Saharan states began to remove legal barriers in order to adjust their policies, thereby adopting a more favorable approach to contraception. The most notable of which, were the states still upholding their pre-colonial, pronatalist beliefs, such as those in Francophone Africa, who began to support the provision of NGO-backed contraceptive services, and in subsequent years would provide family planning services of their own (UN, 2003).
1990-2000: Integrating family planning and women’s rights
Dedicated preparation at the national, regional, and global level allowed representatives at the 1994 International Conference for Population and Development in Cairo to make unprecedented moves in the realm of family planning and women’s reproductive health. At the onset of the 1990s, advocacy groups specializing in women’s health and women’s rights made it their prerogative to shift the focus of the “final major global United Nations population conference of the twentieth century ”from “demographics and targets to women’s lives (Casterline, 2000).
Thus, the emerging Programme of Action was framed around the promotion of women’s rights and considered female empowerment to be “a cornerstone of population and development programmes” (UN, 2003). In addition from a third of all calls to action having direct reference to women and girls, what made this a truly revolutionary document for its time are the inclusion of men’s fertility development and the condemnation of social ills and traditional practices that had long been taboo in the international arena, such as genital mutilation. Therefore, it was in this light that representatives called upon national governments to adopt the following roles. Firstly, access to reproductive health services should be made available to “all individuals of appropriate ages.” Secondly, it was the government’s duty to “assess the unmet need for good-quality family-planning services and take steps to meet this need,” and lastly primary healthcare should be expanded to include maternal and children’s health services (UN, 2003).
Rebecca Brindza is an inquisitive researcher and social scientist. Her areas of expertise include international affairs, diplomacy and strategy, conflict resolution, mental health issues and disaster & emergency management.Her independent research involves discovering innovative, track-2 approaches for cross-cultural collaboration within the Greater Middle East in the fields of health, science, and innovative technology etc.
To Be Continued…..
