‘Population anxiety’ fuelling harmful fertility policies, says UN

Rising “population anxiety” is leading governments to adopt ineffective and harmful fertility policies that damage human rights and gender equality, the UN has warned.

Climate change, mass displacement, the Covid pandemic and economic uncertainty have fuelled a widespread fear of both overpopulation and underpopulation across the globe in recent years, according to research by the UN’s sexual and reproductive agency (UNFPA) released on Wednesday.

Countries have been trying to “manipulate their demographic futures by implementing policy responses that are not always meaningful, adequate or reasonable”, said Michael Herrmann, senior adviser on economics and demography at UNFPA.

Policy changes in Poland in the past few years have reduced access to emergency contraception and limited sex education, the report said. In Turkey, public family planning services have been curbed, leading to more women getting into debt after paying out of pocket for sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Nations with low fertility rates, mostly in the developed world, are experiencing sharp reductions in the number of working-age adults, as ageing populations take a greater toll on health and social care services. Governments are agonising over the impact of these trends on public finances and economic output.

“Countries that are concerned about low and falling fertility become less ambitious about ensuring universal access to family planning: some restrict abortion rights where they are illegal, some eliminate sex education from school curricula,” said Herrmann.

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In high-fertility countries, governments can veer towards imposing coercive measures, said Tomas Sobotka, deputy director of the Vienna Institute of Demography. These policies can end up targeting minorities, which are often singled out as groups that are “over-reproducing”, he added.

Doctors in Uzbekistan spoke of pressure to perform forced sterilisation on women with more than two children, with the aim of controlling population growth, the report said.

In India, which has long offered financial incentives for sterilisation, there are proposals to penalise families that exceed two children, in the form of lost benefits and exclusion from local elected office and certain government jobs.

Women in both low and high fertility countries said their ideal family included two children, according to the report.

“Fertility policies are never neutral,” said Natalia Kanem, the UNFPA’s executive director. Demographic policies were intrinsically misguided when motivated by nativism, fears of economic decline or immigration, or by the idea that a women’s primary job was to have children, she added.

“Blaming women for producing an insufficient supply of babies ignores much more viable solutions that can be implemented while respecting human rights, such as increasing productivity by achieving gender parity in the workforce, expanding access to affordable childcare and by looking to migration to fill labour shortages in low-fertility countries,” she said.

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Voluntary family planning programmes can help cut maternal mortality rates, reduce adolescent pregnancies and improve educational attainment, the report said, but economic and development benefits should come second to the “essential goal of empowering women and girls to exercise choice over their own bodies and futures”.

“Policies should not enforce top-down government views about desirable fertility levels or population size,” said Sobotka, adding that focusing only on financial incentives would fail in the long term.

“Women in lower-fertility countries are now highly educated and do not want to spend their productive ages solely as housewives caring for their kids,” he added.