UN claims pop funds “shortfalls”
Shortfalls in promised assistance for third world population planning programs will, according to a report recently released by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), result in “at least 120 million additional unwanted pregnancies, 49 million abortions, 5 million deaths of infants and young children, and [an additional] 65,000 maternal deaths over the period 1995—2000.”
These were the preliminary conclusions of a new “study” prepared by UNFPA for its executive board. UNFPA noted that although developing countries continue to increase their spending on reproductive health in line with the recommendation of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), funding by the more prosperous donor nations has stagnated in the past year, raising concern that such donors may not meet their share of the $l7 billion goal for the year 2000.
At the ICPD conference in Cairo, governments had agreed that developing countries should cover two-thirds of the cost of a broad package of “basic reproductive health and family planning services,” an impossible requirement in the opinion of many observers. According to the ICPD schedule, funds needed for the population programs will rise to $17 billion in 2000, hold steady at that level for a number of years, and then rise to $21.7 billion in 2015. In 1995, the latest year for which data are available, developing countries spent around $7.5 billion on population programs while international assistance, in the form of grants and loans, amounted to ‘“only” $2 billion.
The UNFPA report considered three scenarios in which spending on population programs failed to meet the goal. Cumulatively, these scenarios produce a dire set of predictions for the period 1995-2000, including the following: “122 to 200 million unintended or unwanted pregnancies that would have been avoided had [family planning] services been available, resulting in 49 to 88 million additional abortions and 57 to l04 million unintended births; 65,000 to 117,000 additional maternal deaths, and another 844,000 to 1.5 million women who could suffer chronic or permanent impairment [from their pregnancies]; and 5.2 to 9.3 million additional deaths of infants and young children.”
The report noted that “[t]hese grim figures are not carved in stone. They can be avoided if countries act as they said they would in Cairo in 1994. The countries of the world need to examine their financial commitments…and resolve to abide by the resource targets universally agreed to at the ICPD.”
(UNFPA press release, 13 May; M2 Communications, 15 May.)
WHO declares human cloning unethical
In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that any use of clotting techniques to create identical humans was “unacceptable” and suggested that experiments in this direction should be banned.
“WHO considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable,” Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the United Nations agency, said in a publicly issued statement. Such actions, he added, “would violate some of the basic principles which govern medically assisted procreation including respect for human dignity and the protection of human genetic material.”
WHO released the statement following a forecast by British researchers, who have successfully cloned a sheep, that human cloning could be a reality within one or two years if scientists wanted to do it. Although a special WHO group of researchers looking into medically-assisted human reproduction and related ethical issues had voiced support for maintaining freedom of scientific research, the group stressed that there was a near universal consensus on the need to prohibit “extreme forms of experimentation, such as human cloning.” (Reuter, 11 March.)
More women contracept
The Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Information and Policy Analysis (DESIPA) issued its third global monitoring report on contraceptive use, entitled Levels and Blends of Contraceptive Use as Assessed in 1994 . The report covered 119 countries including about 90 percent of the world’s population.
The report found that the most widely used methods of contraception were almost always female ones, with sterilization being number one, accounting for 30 percent of contraceptive use worldwide. Intra-uterine devices (IUDs) accounted for 21 percent and oral contraceptive pills for 14 percent. (M2 Communications, 10 March.)
