POPULATION-UN: New Wrinkles to Population Debate

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

THE HAGUE, Feb 11 1999 (IPS) - The debate on population has taken many twists and turns over the years, but some battle lines have solidified between Malthusians and development experts, North vs. South on issues of financing and priorities and the Catholic Church against feminists – have solidified.

But the current review of population policies at the Hague Forum shows that for the first time, many of these controversies seem to have diminished or are irrelevant.

There have been few grim warnings about the demographic boom; nor has the presence of a Vatican delegation generated much heat, despite differences over the concept of “safe abortion” and the use of new devices like the RU-486 birth-control pill.

In some ways, many of the old battles were settled during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. At that time Northern feminists and pro-development Southerners united to force a decisive shift away from population efforts focusing solely on preventing births to one involving women’s health and empowerment.

At the Hague Forum Feb 8-12, delegates have referred glowingly to the “paradigm shift” since ICPD and UN officials and political delegations alike have lauded the move away from intense debate on population growth and development.

The focus now, as described by Mahmoud Fathalla, former chairman of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, is one in which women are “ends and not means, subjects and not objects.” In many ways, one of the major new developments is what Bangladeshi Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury calls the prominence of a “rights-based approach”.

Discussions have veered away from the debates of the 1960s and 1970s over whether population growth represented a global crisis to one in which the rights of parents and individuals – and especially women’s rights – are stressed.

Signs of that shift are everywhere.

Phrases like ‘population control’ and ‘the population bomb’ are out, after years of declining usage; phrases like ‘reproductive health’ and ‘expanding women’s choices’ are everywhere.

Delegations discuss other health issues, particularly the AIDS crisis, and the idea of “creating a sustaining environment” by improving education and women’s rights; by contrast, the fact that world population will reach six billion this year has drawn little attention, and is not perceived as a crisis.

Even the traditional debate between feminists and Roman Catholic church officials has been overtaken by the language of rights, with the two sides tussling over whether a women’s reproductive rights included the availability of safe abortions.

The Church scorned the concept that any type of abortion could be included as a right, even as it tried to emphasise the rights of the ‘unborn’.

The shift in paradigms towards rights has been demonstrated clearly at The Hague by the dramatic visibility of youth groups, normally a marginal participation in most international conferences on social issues.

The Youth Forum that preceded the five-day Hague gathering of more than 100 national delegations came out with an unusually confident platform for the future, including calls to earmark 20 percent of population-related expenditure on youth needs and an eyebrow-raising demand to educate youth on sexuality and “sexual pleasure”.

“The youth message is very strong,” argued Rachel Russell, a Youth Forum member who also works for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “We need to be involved in all decision- making at all levels.”

In many ways, the ICPD set the stage for the shift to a wide- ranging discussion of rights. Nicolaas Biegman, president of the Hague Forum, noted that the Cairo conference had established that “all couples and individuals have the basic right to determine freely the number and the spacing of their children.”

Although the concept of “basic right” is not as precisely defined as that of human rights, “a basic right is very close to a human right” and is applicable to all countries, Biegman said.

Any discussion on rights inevitably also includes talk about responsibilities.

Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, warned about the current AIDS crisis in which more than 33 million people worldwide are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), calling it a major development since the 1994 Cairo conference. But, along with other experts, he argued that men must take more responsibility to prevent the spread of AIDS.

“Let’s get serious about the role of men in HIV/AIDS and giving up male privilege,” Piot said.

If governments are serious about abandoning male privilege and turning over power to youths, then the rights-based approach on population issues has certainly yielded a significant political shift.

Yet like the North-South disputes of the past – which in this conference have essentially boiled down to a tussle over money – the assertion of basic rights could just be one victory in a long series of conference-staged battles in years ahead.