On the eve of the annual UN Commission on the Population and Development, the UN Population Division (UNPD) issued a policy brief calling for heightened governmental action on fertility reduction in the 49 countries the UN General Assembly calls the "least developed." The paper - "What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?" -complains that, "Fast population growth, fueled by high fertility, hinders the reduction of poverty and the achievement of other internationally agreed development goads."
The unnamed authors report that, "the fertility of developing countries dropped from 5.6 children per woman in 1970 to 3.6 in 1985 and reached 2.8 children per woman in 1995. In contrast, the fertility of the least developed countries dropped by just 0.4 of a child from 1970 to 1985 (from 6.5 children per woman to 6.1) and was still a high 5.4 children per woman in 1995." The paper asserts high fertility rates inevitably result in higher rates of poverty.
The paper concludes that there is an enormous "unmet need" for family planning in the least developed countries. To UN agencies, family planning means exclusively contraception and availability of abortion. The paper says, "Data on contraceptive prevalence corroborate that the use of modern contraceptive methods among women in the least developed countries remain low, with just 24 percent of women … using modern methods."
Demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute told the Friday Fax that the report is "infused with a statist, neo-Malthusian conceit that human preferences about family size are fundamentally malleable by government." In a paper published in Great Britain in 2007, Eberstadt challenged the claim that high fertility automatically equals high rates of poverty. He pointed out that world population quadrupled in the 20th century yet global GDP per capita "more than quintupled."
He recently described the new UNPD policy paper's thesis as "dead ideas that died long ago" and argued that the single most accurate predictor of national fertility levels is the desired family size reported by prospective parents-not the scale or intensity of government programs for greater contraceptive use.
Eberstadt pointed out that Lant Princhett, a Harvard economist then senior economist at the World Bank, convincingly made the case that desire is the key determinant of family size a decade and a half ago, in a major 1994 study in Population and Development Review, the leading journal in the field.
After examining voluminous survey data, Pritchett concluded that "In countries where fertility is high, women want more children. 'Excess' or 'unwanted' fertility plays a minor role in explaining fertility differences. Moreover, the level of contraceptive use, measures of contraceptive availability … and family planning effort have little impact on fertility."
Pritchett also punctured one of the main themes of the new UNPD paper: the concept of "unmet need." Pritchett has pointed out that "unmet need" is defined extremely broadly: …in calculating 'unmet need' all women not wanting a child immediately who report not using contraception (even for reasons other than cost and availability - for example, infrequent sexual activity, dislike of side effects of contraception, or religious objections) are classified as 'needing' contraception." Harvard's Pritchett termed this definition "paternalistic."
The UN Commission on Population and Development is meeting this week in New York and will focus almost exclusively on ideas related to contraception and abortion.
(This article reprinted by LifeSiteNews.com with permission from http://www.c-fam.org)
Contact: Austin Ruse
Source: C-FAM / LifeSiteNews.com
Publish Date: April 2, 2009
