It's WPD 2008!

No, this blog title is not a typo. I don't mean "WYD" (World Youth Day), I mean "World Population Day." It was technically July 11, as the girls at Feministing have informed me.

The Bush administration, to their ire, has blocked funding to it for the seventh consecutive year (good for them), despite the Feministas claiming that "Family planning is a human right."

The spiel from the United Nations Population Fund:

n 1968, world leaders proclaimed that individuals have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children. Forty years later, modern contraception remains out of reach for hundreds of millions of women, men and young people.

This year’s World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families. It encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real – especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as marginalized populations and young people.

When people can plan their families, they can plan their lives. They can plan to beat poverty. They can plan on healthier mothers and children. They can plan to gain equality for women. Plan to support World Population Day this year!

A 10 second Google search, however, reveals the other things the UNFPA supports:

• UNFPA Population Awards Honor Abortion Advocates: "One of the awards’ most controversial past recipients was Qian Xinzhong, who as minister of China's State Family Planning Commission was responsible for overseeing China’s draconian one-child policy, which included forced abortion and mandatory sterilization."
• US Government Withholds UNFPA Funding over Coerced Abortion for Another Year
• 'Abolish the United Nations Population Fund': "It is an organization that was set up in 1968 for the purpose of reducing fertility rates around the world, and over the past three-and-a-half decades it has not deviated from that purpose. To give you one example, the U.N. Population Fund recently offered the government of Pakistan $250 million in aid in return for the insertion of sex education programs in all of the primary and secondary schools throughout Pakistan, sex education programs which would not only provide-impose-sex education on young and innocent children but would also attempt to instill in them norms of small family size, to instill in them anti-natal attitudes."
• UN Declares Abortion a Universal Right; Enforced Pregnancy an International Crime: "At issue are globally guaranteed "freedom of sexual expression," access to contraceptives and abortion for the world's youth (defined by the UN World Health Organization as 10-18 year olds) without parental consent, and the demand that abortion and "gender equity" be granted status as a universal human right."
• U.N. plans ways to limit births: the United Nations population fund supports abortion and sterilization programs throughout the third world and is seeking to impose birth-control methods as human rights

The message? Birth control: it's for other people (mostly the poor).