This essay was first published by Population Institute in their 2024 report Revitalizing Population and Development in the 21st Century:
International Conference on Population and Development 30 Years On.

These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing, and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion, and violence, as expressed in human rights documents. In the exercise of this right, they should take into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community.

— ICPD PROGRAMME OF ACTION, PARAGRAPH 7.3

The Programme of Action (PoA) stemming from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) represented a dramatic swerve away from acknowledging the role of population reduction in promoting ecological sustainability and social justice to an approach grounded in enhancing sexual and reproductive health. While the elevation of reproductive rights by the PoA appeared commendable, its shift away from demographic and ecological issues has been calamitous and has undermined many of its own social and reproductive justice goals (DeJong, 2000; Campbell and Bedford, 2009, Coole, 2021).

The statements from the PoA passages on the preceding page seem benevolent. However, they were disproportionately motivated as a response to reprehensible population policies of the time, especially India’s and Puerto Rico’s coercive sterilization campaigns and China’s one-child policy. Fearful of repeating such egregious human rights violations, feminist delegates—buttressed by the pro-growth interests of religious and market fundamentalists present at the ICPD—framed all population reduction efforts as coercive (DeJong, 2000; Campbell and Bedford, 2009, Coole, 2021). In doing so, they wrote off most of the voluntary international family planning efforts that had played a dramatic role in women’s reproductive liberation in the preceding decades (Robinson and Ross, 2007; Weisman, 2013; Bongaarts and Hodgson, 2021).

ICPD Overlooked the Sway of Millennia-Old Patriarchal Pronatalism

Unfortunately, what was missed in the PoA was the equally egregious and far more pervasive source of reproductive coercion: pronatalism. Pronatalism is a raft of patriarchal, religious, nationalistic, and economic pressures on women to bear children, in order to grow and entrench these power structures. Pronatalism heavily biases, and even structurally coerces, women (and men) in favor of childbearing, identifying parenthood as expectation or obligation instead of authentic choice. It undermines reproductive self-determination and is a source of much suffering, confusion, and violence against girls and women (Bajaj, 2022).

Pronatalism emerged as institutionalized patriarchy came to prevail with the rise of early states and empires some 5,000 years ago that depended on population expansion and seizure of resources to consolidate power (Saini, 2023). Pregnancy and motherhood became increasingly idealized through policies and rhetoric enshrined in law, religion, media, education, and medicine (Hollingworth, 1916; Carroll, 2021). Despite the historic gains in gender equality over the last few decades, the chokehold of millennia-old patriarchal pronatalism remains deeply embedded within social policies and norms.

Pronatalist Norms and Policies Continue to Shape Reproductive Behaviors Today

Patriarchal pronatalist norms and policies strongly influence, if not outright dictate, fertility behavior in cultures around the world. Family pressures to bear children or grandchildren are often the most intense, as unwillingness or inability to have any (or additional) children can lead to disownment, divorce, domestic violence, social stigmatization, or economic marginalization. Religious pressures are expressed in the form of scriptural mandates to “be fruitful and multiply,” and/or by means of thwarting access to contraceptives and abortion. Nationalist and ethnocentric pronatalist policies range from baby bonuses and tax incentives for large families to abortion bans, stricter divorce laws, and laxer domestic violence policies. Neoliberal pronatalism, vying for cheap labor and more consumers, shows up in mainstream media, social media, and advertising imagery that glorify pregnancy and motherhood (Bajaj and Stade, 2023). Lack of accessible and affordable family planning counseling, contraception options, and abortion services, largely due 17 to patriarchal and religious barriers and stigma, results in staggering numbers of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions each year globally (Bearak et al., 2020). Topping a new wave of pronatalism in our day, “baby bust” alarmism is on the rise worldwide bemoaning declining fertility rates and aging populations (Bajaj, 2022).

Under the influence of such punitive regulation of reproductive behaviors, it is no surprise that women’s stated preferences for number and timing of children tend to closely conform to the acceptable norms within the community in which they reside (Campbell and Bedford, 2009; Dasgupta and Dasgupta, 2021; Owoo, 2023). Given how powerfully pronatalist norms shape reproductive decisionmaking, we must expose the sociocultural pronatalist landscape in order to enable women and men to make authentic and free reproductive decisions (Bajaj, 2022). Absent that structural analysis, the PoA’s championing of “the right of all couples and individuals to decide freely,” and “the right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion, and violence” is sociologically naïve. It propounds an illusion of “freedom” which is virtually nonexistent given the millennia-old and still-strong patriarchal norms of compulsive pronatalism that block actual reproductive autonomy. By not recognizing the coercive forces impinging on women and girls, the PoA statements simply empower patriarchal pronatalism to continue to hold sway.

ICPD’s Hollow Avowal of Reproductive Responsibility Missed the Rights of Children

On the face of it, PoA’s avowal regarding reproductive responsibility is commendable, supporting “the right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so,” while taking “into account the needs of their living and future children and their responsibilities towards the community” (emphasis added). However, when the rights of children to be born into conditions conducive to their wellbeing are taken robustly and meaningfully under consideration, the reproductive behavior of adults cannot be deemed an unlimited right. The decision to bring (or not bring) children into the world should become an other-regarding act that calls for mindful behavior and moral scrutiny (Hedberg, 2020; Rieder, 2024).

For potential parents to make responsible decisions requires not only “the information and means” to control their fertility, but also education and understanding about the physical, emotional, financial, and environmental repercussions of bearing children (Hedberg, 2020; Rieder, 2024). The assumption that discussing environmental concerns in the context of reproductive decision-making is a subterfuge to manipulate women’s decisions is paternalistic, grossly underrating people’s ability to think of their decisions in larger contexts. Discounting planetary considerations in reproduction not only places parents and children outside the ecological milieu (a biophysical impossibility), it also assumes that women are incapable of linking their decisions to nature’s wellbeing. Given the deteriorating plight of children worldwide on multiple social and ecological fronts— extreme poverty, child marriage, climate-related catastrophes, pollution-related toxification, child labor, undernourishment, freshwater shortages, and food insecurity— reproductive responsibility in terms of heeding children’s rights must be urgently elevated (UNICEF, 2014; ILO and UNICEF, 2021; UNICEF, 2021; Salmeron Gomez et al., 2023).

ICPD at 30: The Job Is Not Yet Done

Given the indisputable role of human numbers in fueling social conflicts and ecological breakdown, it is crucial to bring demographic concerns back into the environmental and reproductive rights discourse. We live in a time of profound ecological overshoot resulting from unchecked demographic and economic growth, which in tandem are driving climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, species extinctions, resource scarcity, conflict, poverty, food insecurity, and more (Bradshaw et al., 2021; Rees, 2023; Fletcher et al., 2024)

Amid the growth-biased modern day anxiety about declining birth rates in industrialized countries, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that our global population continues to grow by more than 70 million per year. The global middle class is expanding rapidly. A billion more consumers will inflate its ranks to 5.3 billion in this decade (Kharas and Hamel, 2018). Surely all people have a right to a good standard of living. Yet the swelling global middle class is driving an acceleration of 18 ecological impacts on course to tip the planet into a state shift that will imperil all complex life (Crist, 2019; Fletcher et al., 2024).

Recognizing how profoundly population growth is driven by pronatalist forces means that population growth is essentially premised on the subjugation of girls and women in order to strengthen patriarchal power structures. The past 50 years of active efforts by governments and NGOs to confront patriarchal reproductive norms through voluntary family planning programs, combined with growing access to education and employment opportunities for girls and women, have led to marked declines in fertility rates in most countries—yet these current trends still result in a United Nations (UN) medium variant population projection of 10.4 billion by 2100 (UN DESA. 2022). Massive international investment in family planning interventions and reproductive norm-shifting programs, such as radio shows, soap operas, and other cultural initiatives would accelerate these trends, resulting in the UN’s low variant population projection of 6 billion by 2100, or even lower by other estimates (Tucker, 2021; Ryerson, Bajaj, and Ware, 2022; UN DESA, 2022). In addition to elevating reproductive self-determination and enhancing the rights and wellbeing of children, these programs would also curtail further ecological damage (Engelman, 2008; Campbell and Bedford, 2009; Bajaj and Stade, 2023; Hedberg, 2021).

A smaller global population, within a socially and ecologically just economy, promises to facilitate other needed transformations: mitigating climate change, conserving and rewilding ecosystems, making agriculture sustainable, strengthening social safety nets, integrating seniors into meaningful social roles, redefining family through diverse kinship pathways, and making communities more resilient and able to welcome climate and war refugees (Crist, 2019, Skirbekk, 2022; Population Institute, 2023).

A reappraisal of the Programme of Action which recognizes that the rights and wellbeing of all are directly linked to the downscaling of the human enterprise within a rights-based approach is not only possible, but urgently needed.

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