Since its founding in 1969, the United Nations Population Fund has been animated by a racist impulse to get African, Asian, and Latin American women to have fewer children by forcing onto their societies a regime of mass contraceptive usage and free-flowing abortion.
Filled with feverish dreams that a growing population in developing countries would create an environmental disaster — as well as a general attitude that large families were unhealthy for women’s role in society and needed to be curtailed lest Earth be stuck in a patriarchal system — they set out with the goal of singlehandedly reaching out to every single woman in developing countries with propaganda and the offer of contraceptives. (RELATED: What Will the US Do When Young People Begin to Disappear?)
With countries all across the world spiraling toward lower and lower fertility rates — and outright civilizational suicide — you could say the United Nations Population Fund has achieved all its wildest dreams. (RELATED: This Is What Civilizational Suicide Looks Like)
That is most particularly the case in China, where the agency expressed thrill over the regime’s one-child policy, which, of course, was administered through forced abortions, forced sterilizations, kidnappings, and coercion. In 2003, Douglas A. Sylva of International Organizations Research Group published a white paper documenting how, alongside the country’s implementation of the one-child policy, the United Nations Population Fund doled out $50 million to China for population control and provided its expertise on child-preventing before going on to cheerlead for the program and deny its human rights abuses. China’s mass regime of abortions was such that 53 million children were murdered in the womb from 1979 to 1984 alone, according to the Washington Post. The majority of these were forced abortions made in compliance with the regime’s dictate that any children conceived after the birth of another child ought to be killed.
The United Nations Population Fund is now in total defense mode. Virtually everything they are saying now can be read as covering up and recasting their role in the societal disaster that is declining fertility. In their 2025 annual report, they create a new strategy for this deceit. They claim that the “real” fertility crisis is that people can’t have the exact number of children they want. “The answer,” they say, “lies in reproductive agency, a person’s ability to make free and informed choices about sex, contraception and starting a family.” In other words, they’ve moved to a new justification for their continued effort to increase contraception and abortion uptake, a program that was long intended — and publicly so — to make sure there would be fewer African, Asian, and Latin American people. (RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs)
They even invented the claim that anti-abortion laws decrease fertility rates.
Plus, they’ve created new ways to smear those concerned about the fertility crisis, claiming that such persons are driven by “ethnonationalist views” and are seeking to roll back “gender equality.” They even invented the claim that anti-abortion laws decrease fertility rates. Until recently, the agency had advocated for countries to legalize abortion while saying that such laws would decrease population growth.
It’s almost funny to see them running from their own crisis and spinning up lies in an attempt to cover what they have wrought. Well, it would be, were it not so evil and disastrous.
But before I get to their 2025 “report,” I want to take you back 26 years to their 1999 report. In this one, we can find a lot more honesty about their goals and intentions. Put in juxtaposition to their 2025 report, we can see just how much their dreams flamed out in disaster, and the extent to which they are now rushing to cover up the dystopia they have created.
In 1999, they opened up their report by celebrating the decline in population growth and congratulating themselves on this achievement: “This slowing of population growth is not inevitable. The work of many people over the last 30 years made it possible.” Note that 30 years represented the time that the UN Population Fund had been in existence. They went on to portray the turn of the millennium as “A Time for Choices,” that is, as a time for young people to decide whether they wanted (A) an overpopulated world mired in environmental disaster and gender imbalances or (B) a brave new world of small and responsible family sizes. Today’s young people, the report says, “will decide how fast the world adds the next billion and the billion after that, and whether world population doubles again. Their decisions will influence whether the new billions will be born to lives of poverty and deprivation; whether equality and equity will be established between women and men; and what effect population growth will have on natural resources and the global environment.”
The report stated that the world’s ability to make this supposedly better choice of slower population growth would depend on the UN agency’s implementation of contraception and abortion across the world. “Whether [the slowing of population growth] continues,” the report said, “will depend on choices and action in the next 10 years. It will depend on the success of population and development policies, and in particular on universal exercise of the right to health including reproductive health.” To achieve their desired lower fertility rates, the Population Fund stated their intention to achieve the “Provision of universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family-planning methods and to related reproductive and sexual health services by 2015.” Moreover, they encouraged women’s participation in the labor force under the rationale that it “often accompanies and reinforces fertility decline.”
They claimed that they were justified in enacting this mass scheme of contraception and abortion with the goal of decreasing population growth because doing so would alleviate poverty: “Evidence that high fertility exacerbates poverty justifies family planning programmes as part of a broad social development strategy.” The fact that controlling populations worldwide would feed UN ideologues’ desire for power was an added benefit. As was the fact that it would allow them to snuff out what they saw as backward and oppressive: women having numerous children instead of working in the labor force.
At this time, the agency’s executive director, Nafis Sadik, was not shy about her desire for the UN to intervene drastically via contraception and abortion for the sake of decreasing population growth. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, Sadik advocated for the UN to invest all efforts in decreasing population growth such that the world would meet the UN’s low variant for global population size for 2015 of 7.27 billion. To reach this goal, she said that her agency needed to achieve 71 percent contraceptive prevalence over the whole globe. Notably, her agency succeeded in achieving this goal for decreased population growth.
Running From Their Role in the Fertility Crisis
The United Nations Population Fund is now hiding from the fact that it engaged in this population control scheme for the very purpose of decreasing fertility rates. Now, they say they’re all about giving people “choices.”
In their newfound appraisal, the problem, rather than being overpopulation or underpopulation, is that millions of people “cannot exercise their reproductive rights and choices,” and that this results in the “inability of individuals to realize their desired fertility goals.” The solution, they say, is “the full realization of reproductive rights.”
Notice how this entirely breaks from their previous position that “family planning programmes” were justified and necessary because they would decrease population growth. And how they feign innocence, pretending that they never led or even participated in efforts to control population sizes. They write — jaw-droppingly, considering this was their raison d’être for decades: “[P]olicies to decrease fertility rates may do little, and can in extreme cases cause harm.” They go on to say that the population growth of the 20th century “provoked widespread anxiety” and that this “led to many policies that resulted in harmful consequences and rights violations.” Indeed, it did lead to such rights violations, but the UN Population Fund was the organization that provoked such anxieties in the first place and that campaigned for and funded such policies.
And yet, in this report, while refusing to apologize for or acknowledge this reality, they keep on claiming that any coercive attempts at controlling populations are immoral and wrong-headed. “Coercive programmes not only violate human rights,” they say, “but the degree to which they impact fertility in the long term has also been questioned.”
A Deceit Renewed
This isn’t the first time that the United Nations Population Fund has glommed onto feminist ideologies to hide its agenda and impact on decreasing global fertility. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, UN advocates of forestalling population growth officially took up feminist ideas of “reproductive health” and “choice” to provide additional rationale to their birth control scheme. But the extent to which this remained a cover for the same old plot of controlling population growth was made clear in 1999 by Hillary Clinton.
At The Hague Forum, a UN conference that looked back at the 1994 conference from five years previously, Hillary Clinton argued that, at the Cairo conference, “the world agreed that smaller families and slower population growth are created by choice and opportunities, not coercion and controls.” Note that, for Hillary, the goal remained the same: “smaller families and slower population growth”; only the proclaimed mechanism, “choice and opportunities,” changed. At the same time, the practical work carried out by the UN Population Fund — increasing contraceptive uptake — remained the same. One can imagine that the practical effect of smaller families also remained the same, regardless of the changed call for “choice and opportunities.”
The UN may well have proclaimed that “choice and opportunities” were just a front for planned population control when the next speaker stepped up to the podium. That speaker was China’s Zhang Yuqin, who held a major role running the State Family Planning Commission, that is, the Chinese Communist Party’s commission dedicated to coercive population control. She declared that the Chinese government had decided to oppose all forms of coercion in its population policies. And yet, we know what was really happening.
Ever More (Deceitful) Reasons for ‘Family Planning’
The United Nations Population Fund is desperate to remain relevant in this era of catastrophically low fertility rates, even as their entire founding purpose has become obsolete.
Their 2025 annual report shows that they have chosen to remain relevant by spinning their continued population control measures as incentives for childbearing. The United Nations Population Fund writes in their report that contraceptives and abortion help women to reach their “fertility aspirations.” Restrictions on contraceptives and abortion, they claim, will conversely discourage childbearing.
There’s no evidence for this. In fact, there’s significant evidence that increasing contraceptive and abortion uptake decreases births. The evidence for this is, of course, the results we have from the UN’s own birth control measures of the past 56 years.
And yet, the UN is going with it anyway. They write, “Bans on abortion can lead to individuals voluntarily or involuntarily forgoing reproduction.” The evidence they cite for this is anecdotal stories of women in the United States undergoing sterilization after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. They also cite one example in Romania to “prove” that restrictions on contraception decrease childbearing.
Ridiculously, they declare that anti-abortion laws are not “pro-baby.” Then they proclaim support for a whole host of nontraditional ideas that they say will aid people in reaching their “fertility aspirations.” These include helping single women to have babies, increasing access to “medically assisted reproduction,” and increasing access to “surrogacy” for “LGBTQIA+” people. It’s all just a cry for attention and relevancy.
There are also a number of laughable claims that the UN made in this report that I would be remiss in not mentioning. It claims that a Catholic fertility app is run by “anti-gender activists”; says offering couples tax incentives for having a baby can lead to “coercion”; asserts that focusing on fertility rates for “specific subpopulations” is often “rooted in ethnonationalism”; and inexplicably proclaims that an article by two academics affiliated with the Heritage Foundation on how unlimited federal student loans encourage people to put off child-bearing constitutes “prominent figures openly contemplat[ing] rolling back hard-won gains in gender equality for the purpose of increasing fertility rates.”
This is why the Trump administration pulled all funding from this agency earlier this year. It’s bent on death and destruction, and today, on deceit and denial.
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