For Immediate Release
Contact:
Anne Hendrixson, Director, Population and Development Program, Hampshire College
+1 413-559-5506, ahendrixson@hampshire.edu
https://sites.hampshire.edu/popdev/
Ahead of ICPD25 in Nairobi Feminists Call for Renewed Resistance to Population Control
Amherst, MA, November 11, 2019: Globally, feminist advocates call to resist population control in a statement released ahead of the ICPD25 to be held in Nairobi, Kenya from November 12-14. ICPD25 marks twenty-five years since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development where feminists sought a foregrounding of sexual and reproductive health and rights over population control. This statement points to the troubling persistence of population reduction measures that reinforce social inequality and compromise the conditions necessary for putting sexual and reproductive health and rights into practice. In addition to highlighting the broken promise of the ICPD, the statement specifically rejects the current conference’s “formula for health and wealth,” including the demographic goal of “harnessing the demographic dividend.”
Supported by over 250 individuals and organizations from 26 countries, the statement expresses deep concern over the misguided solutions designed by governments, international agencies and other social institutions when population numbers, composition and movements are seen as causing or worsening climate change, environmental degradation, poverty, war and conflict.
It articulates eight specific demands as part of an integrated response to climate change, environmental racism and toxicity that promote health, including sexual and reproductive health, through social, reproductive and climate justice frameworks.
Anne Hendrixson, Director of the Population and Development Program, urges participants and observers of the ICPD25 to “join this important feminist challenge to population control in the era of climate change and call for a new social justice approach to supporting people and the planet.”
Find the full statement and list of signatories, here.
