By Terrence McKeegan, J.D.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) The annual United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) began this week in New York and marks the 15-year review of the Beijing Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995).

While governments are supposed to be meeting to examine national commitments to implementing the UN Millennium Development Goals, the fight so far has been over the structure and funding for a new women’s super-agency that would essentially subsume the four major existing UN institutions dealing with women’s and gender issues: the Division for the Advancement of Women, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, and the Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues. The wish is that women’s issues get the same institutional weight that children’s issues get from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) even though much of UNICEF now focuses on women rather than children.

UN Member States agreed in principle to create a new women’s agency last fall in the General Assembly, although very few details were disclosed at that time. The long-awaited details were finally released in January in a UN Secretary General Report, which proposed a $500 million annual budget for the agency that would be headed by an Under-Secretary General.

Most prominent among the supporters of the new agency are members of what is called the Gender Equality Architecture Reform campaign (GEAR), which was launched at CSW two years ago by pro-abortion organizations, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). At a GEAR event on Monday, it was reported that African non-governmental organizations (NGO) have complained that the new agency would take away money and focus from basic development issues to emphasize “First World” gender issues. GEAR organizers also had to admit incorrect reports in their own conference newspaper that the $1 billion budget had already been approved along with sweeping new powers for the agency.

Another priority for radical feminist and pro-abortion groups is to make sure no one gets the idea that the UN Population Fund (UNPFA) is no longer necessary, even though the work of the new agency will be quite similar to UNFPA’s. IPPF said on its website, “The important work UNFPA does on sexual and reproductive health and rights should be preserved."

An open question this week is who would lead such an agency. In the halls of the UN, there are widespread rumors that outgoing Chilean President Michele Bachelet is the leading contender to be tapped for the job. Despite Chilean law banning abortion, Bachelet has pushed for access to the abortifacient the “morning after pill” and has thrown her support behind a regional initiative to provide increased access to reproductive health services.

The question of where the money will come from to fund the new entity has been discussed extensively at the conference. It is likely most of the money will be contributed from the existing pool of donor nations including Norway, Sweden, and other rich European countries, along with the United States.

 

UN Aging Report Warns of Dire Effects of Fertility Decline

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) A recently-released United Nations (UN) report finds that the global trend of fertility decline and population aging will have devastating economic and societal effects on the developing world, particularly on women who are now targeted by UN agencies to further reduce fertility.

“World Population Ageing 2009” was published in December 2009 by the UN Population Division, a statistics research branch within the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).

Because fertility is decreasing in the developing world, there will be fewer and fewer workers to support aging citizens, the report found. The ratio of workers to older non-workers dropped from 12 to 9 between 1950 and 2009. By 2050, there will be only 4 workers supporting every retiree: “The reduction of potential support ratios has important implications for social security schemes, particularly for pay-as-you-go pension systems under which taxes on current workers pay the pensions of retirees."

The effects of fertility decline and population aging will hit the developing world hardest, according to the report, because, "The pace of population ageing is faster in developing countries than in developed countries. Consequently, developing countries will have less time to adjust to the consequences of population ageing.” Furthermore, “ageing in developing countries is taking place at lower levels of socio-economic development than has been the case for developed countries.”

Evidence in the report shows that UN programs aimed at reducing fertility in the developed world will do the most harm to women who will have fewer children to support them in their old age. Since women live longer than men, they make up the majority of older persons.

This is compounded by the fact that “Older persons living alone are at greater risk of experiencing social isolation and economic deprivation and may therefore require special support." Social support, however, is often unavailable in the developing world where women are least likely to have social security from the state. What recourse they have to social safety nets has been diminished by the global economic downturn, which “brought about sharp reductions in the value of pension funds in many countries in the world.”

Fertility reduction in the developing world is still pushed by UN agencies such as the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization, as well as non-governmental organizations such as International Planned Parenthood Federation and Women Deliver, a new organization that is garnering significant funding from developed countries to promote fertility control.

The report offered little evidence of a possible reversal of the global aging trend, stating that “Population ageing is unprecedented, a process without parallel in the history of humanity. Population ageing is pervasive since it is affecting nearly all the countries of the world. …and “Population ageing is enduring. ...As long as old-age mortality continues to decline and fertility remains low, the proportion of older persons will continue to increase."

The UN Population Division – an entity distinct from UNFPA – has traditionally been regarded as more objective and less agenda-driven than other UN agencies. In its most recent State of the World Population Report, UNFPA called for increased efforts to reduce fertility to combat climate change.

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