Cairo: Repackaging Population Control

Abstract

Aid agencies, charities, and other Non-governmental organizations once denounced population control programs as racist interference in the third world. Yet, at the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo last September, these same organizations endorsed very similar ideas. The U.N. can now claim that even its fiercest critics not only have muted their criticism of population control programs but now positively endorse them. Over the last 30 years, population control has been consciously repackaged by the U.S. establishment. The image of population control has changed from being overtly anti-third world to being about giving the people of the third world—especially women—basic rights in family planning. Wrapped up in the language of women's empowerment and environmentalism, the establishment's old arguments about there being too many nonwhite babies in the world, have, unfortunately, won the day.