They Now Call Population Control “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights”– www.lifenews.com

The term “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” or SRHR, did not appear out of nowhere. It grew out of a political problem.

For years, the United Nations and Western governments spoke openly about “population control.” But that language generated resistance, particularly from developing countries that had every reason to distrust wealthy nations telling poorer nations that they had too many children. Worse, population programs in the 1970s and 1980s became associated with coercive practices, including forced or pressured contraception and sterilization. Even UNFPA now acknowledges that the move away from population targets came partly in response to abuses connected with population-control policies.

So the vocabulary changed.

Instead of controlling populations, the UN increasingly spoke about “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” and eventually “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The language sounded softer. More personal. More rooted in health and individual rights.

One of the central figures in that transformation was Nafis Sadik, the longtime executive director of the United Nations Population Fund and Secretary-General of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. Sadik aggressively promoted the reproductive-rights framework that came to dominate UN population policy. Cairo became the turning point.

The 1994 conference did not simply update population policy. It changed its vocabulary and architecture. UNFPA itself says Cairo “introduced the concepts of sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” and advanced a new definition of population policy centered on reproductive health and women’s empowerment.