The United Nations Still Doesn't Get It
Maybe William F. Buckley was right
This week, the United Kingdom moved closer to decriminalizing abortion after 24 weeks and enlisting physicians to help the sick and elderly end their lives. Independence Day rarely sounded like such a good idea. If it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters.
To an NGO with a Hammer: Same Old UNFPA
CTC Reminder: New web resource on the Child Tax Credit
It’s Me, Hi: The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Washington Times
Parting Shots
To an NGO with a Hammer
Antipathy towards the United Nations has long been a vibrant strain within conservatism for various reasons. And there’s no question that over its history, the organization has weighed in heavily on the side of those respectable voices who were concerned about overpopulation, irking traditional conservatives. After all, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA, now known as the United Nations Population Fund) was established in 1969, when the “population activities” it was interested in was certainly not the kind that led to higher rates of population.
The first part of its mandate remains to “build the knowledge and the capacity to respond to needs in population and family planning.” Its highly contentious Cairo conference in 1994, in which the Vatican and a cadre of predominantly Muslim nations joined forces to combat an effort to enshrine reproductive rights in the international human rights apparatus, (especially prescient in light of the UK’s recent decision to decriminalize abortion up until birth), sought to “integrate[] population concerns into the broad context of development, concluding that education and health (including reproductive health), were prerequisites for sustainable development” (my EPPC colleague George Weigel’s history on the matter is useful recap of that battle and a real glimpse into how culture has shifted since the 1990s.)
The world has changed since then. And yet as emphasized in its new report, “The Real Fertility Crisis: The pursuit of reproductive agency in a changing world,” the UN may have changed keys, but they’re still singing the same tune.
Credit where due: In a funny adoption of therapy-speak, the UNFPA’s website currently blares that “politicians, media pundits and even some academics” pushing a narrative of overpopulation “oversimplifies complex issues and causes real harm.” (And the UN is also shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café.) The realization that the next global century will be one marked by declining population, with all the economic stagnation, political upheaval, cultural ennui, and social isolation it will cause, can no longer be categorized as an obsession of mouth-breathing reactionaries.
But in their more “nuanced” approach to population dynamics, the UN takes the facts on the ground and interprets them in a way that conveniently fits into their decades-old push to impose WEIRD norms around sex and reproduction onto the rest of the world. “This inability of individuals to realize their desired fertility goals is the real fertility crisis,” the authors argue, “not overpopulation or underpopulation.” They then put a finer point on it: “Clearly, better policies are needed both to enable people to prevent unintended pregnancies and to have children when they are ready for them.”
It’s still the mindset of the enlightened NGO official trying to tell the poor benighted women of the world not to have children until they are “ready,” instead of trying to grapple with the very real fact that many pregnancies do not fall onto a simple binary of “planned” or “unexpected.” A more pro-family world would seek to build systems and policies that supported moms (from whatever walk of like) facing a not-totally-planned pregnancy, rather than assume that every fertility choice can or should be the product of the top-down rigor that may sound good from a philanthropic roundtable but is unfamiliar to anyone who has ever met a human person.
They argue that “popular rhetoric, and even political discourse continues to assign responsibility for falling marriage and fertility rates to women alone,” boldly taking the stand that “men, too, play an essential role in all aspects of reproduction.” Why, yes! I’m glad you mentioned it! In all the report’s recommendations of “equaliz[ing] access to fertility care for those currently left behind…[such as] members of the LGBTQIA+ community or single individuals seeking an unconventional path to parenthood,” it just slightly underemphasizes how each child has a mother and a father, and that the most likely social structure to produce a child is marriage, and that identifying policy solutions that can help young people feel economically stable and culturally supported enough to start families earlier in perhaps the only sustainable way to break out of the demographic doom loop.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to an NGO founded on the mandate to inject the norms of highly educated Western bureaucrats into the apparatus of international development, everything — even the passing of “Peak Child” globally — is an excuse to push progressive gender ideology first. The ethos of the report is one that sees slumping global population falling off a table as not a civilization-defining crisis, but as an opportunity to cast its mission of “gender equality and dividends for all” in a new light.
There are many conversations about supporting parents, or boosting birth rates (not always one and the same thing!) that could be much more fruitful (no pun intended.) For instance, I have some strong disagreements with Anna Louie Sussman’s latest reported opinion piece for the New York Times (is a good-faith reading of conservative pro-natalist efforts that they (we?) are prescribing little more than “useless husbands”?). But she at least takes seriously the idea that America has made parenting too hard; I could imagine a very productive conversation between her, folks in the center, and maybe even some libertarians about where we could spend more or regulate less to make American parenthood less grueling.1
The UN report does mentions economic support ideas like a baby bonus, and spends about a paragraph nodding to the “economic and educational factors” that could be leading to a decline in marriage, before quickly back pivoting to narratives around gender equality and “blame.” They don’t even really hide the ball about the Wrong People being interested in some of these ideas:
“Worse still, there is an active backlash against progress in this area, for both men and women, with ever-louder and coordinated proponents of regressive norms, which claim to support marriage and family but actually restrict the rights, choices, health and welfare of families and individuals.”
Whose progress? Which regressivity? The bulk of the report is clearly premised on equivalizing people who have unwanted pregnancies and those who aren’t able to have the number of children they want as if they are two sides of the same coin. But that packs a rather large wide variety of dissimilar incentives, structures, and circumstances under a misshapen brush stroke. The set of policy mechanisms or cultural outlooks that need to be changed to give a young couple in Malmö or La Plata the stability to find a place to call their own, settle down, and think about having a child is different in all manners of degree and kind than the interventions that can reduce maternal mortality and morbidity in Sierra Leone.
An international body that prescribes expanded access to surrogacy and access to abortion as the solution to declining birth rates and prescribes is one that is doing politics, not effective problem solving, and should be treated as such (nor should one who believes that a global project, headed out of New York, to remake global norms that “boys must be taught the value of care from a young age” could succeed. Who’s the ideological idealist now?)
William F. Buckley2 once wrote that “the U.N. is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions,” and it does not do for Americans “to ignore that fact or, worse, to get used to it.” In his day, the moral realities betrayed by the U.N. were ones of realpolitik and the Soviet bloc. Today, he might well point to the reality that the fertility decline is downstream from the marriage decline, and the insistence that some NGOs have to advance their own hobbyhorses rather than adjust to the facts on the ground.
Reminder: Child Tax Credit website
As a reminder, for those who missed it last week, CTCfacts.org, a new hub for resources about the impact of the Child Tax Credit, has gone live. It has state-by-state one-page factsheets on the impact of the CTC, who benefits, and answers to some of your (or your friends’) frequently-asked questions about how the CTC is structured.
Click on over to CTCfacts.org for facts and figures about my (and what should be your) favorite part of the tax code.
It’s Me, Hi
For the Washington Post, I offered some advice to new dads as part of their Father’s Day compendium:
“Whatever fatherhood looks like, it’s an invitation to put your strength, your sleep, your whole self on the line, even when it means forgoing creature comforts or pushing muscles in ways no workout could ever match.”
I was quoted in Olga Khazan’s reporting for The Atlantic on the strains of lean-in-type rhetoric she hears from some pro-life advocates:
“A Leave It to Beaver–style, more patriarchal approach to pronatalism is just not going to work,” Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, who focuses on family policy and has four kids, told me. (He works part-time, and his wife is a tenure-track professor.)”
I spoke to the Washington Times’ Emma Ayres about the new startup that purports to give parents the ability to screen embryos for IQ, looks, and other traits:
Patrick Brown, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said he fears the technology will become “the new standard” among parents who can afford it. “Of course, why wouldn’t you go through this to ensure that your kid has the greatest chance of health and success and IQ and wealth and athletic ability and beauty and all the rest?…I mean, are you a terrible parent if you’re not doing these things? I think that that may become, among the sort of high-income brackets, that may become the new standard.”
Parting Shots
Connecticut is going big on child care, looking to make it free for households earning less than $100,000, boosting wages and benefits for preschool employees, allocating money for supply build-out, and more
Benjamin Guggenheim reports that the CBO’s dynamic estimate that the Oh-Triple-B will add around $2.8 trillion in debt is being met with a shrug from Republicans (Politico)
Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano and Margot Sanger-Katz crunched the numbers and estimated that the Oh-Triple-B (Scott Bessent and I are going to make this happen) would be more distributionally regressive than any bill in recent decades (The New York Times)
Melissa Kearney and Luke Pardue have some ideas for a Congress that was hypothetically interested in tax reforms that were pro-work and pro-family; alas, we live in a fallen world (The Hill); they have a fuller report on the topic at the Aspen Institute
Devyani Singh has a new report thinking through the user experience of benefits delivered through the tax code — important work (New America)
Jule Pattison-Gordon reports on some of the tax incentives, pilot programs, and regulation revisitations that some states are adopting to seek to make child care work better (Governing)
“I’m a fertility doctor, and I think IVF needs more regulation,” writes Dr. Brian Levine (STAT)
Washington has passed a law, sponsored by state Sen. Emily Alvarado, that will explicitly allow child care in most non-industrially zoned areas throughout the state (The Columbian)
Upcoming event: The Federal Trade Commission will be hosting a workshop called “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors” on July 9 in Washington D.C.
Kathryn Jean Lopez hosted Leah Libresco Sargeant for a discussion about the Child Tax Credit and the GOP reconciliation bill for the National Review Institute:
Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.
One potential helpful area of clarification is that I think (at least in the U.S. context,) we could imagine a Sussman-Brown comprehensive plan finding some real areas of common interest around pro-parent policy, which may be under a larger umbrella of pro-family policy, but is largely separate and distinct from pro-natal policy — as Sussman’s piece mentions but underplays, her “woman-friendly and birth-friendly” ideal of Denmark has lower birth rates than the U.S.
As it happens, there will be what looks to be a dynamite panel on Buckley on the centenary of his birth at the American Enterprise Institute next week, featuring his intellectual heirs Matthew Continetti, Jonah Goldberg, Yuval Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru