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Laura Villa speaking on youth issues.

Photo by Maria de Bruyn

Marking the 15th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, governments from around the world met last month in New York for the 42nd Session of the United Nations Commission on Population and Development.

Delegates reaffirmed the ICPD Programme of Action adopted in 1994 and urged governments and donors to prioritize universal access to sexual and reproductive information and services, including family planning, safe abortion care in circumstances where it is not against the law, and reduction of abortion through improved family planning services. The Commission’s final resolution also urged that young people be given information and access to the widest possible range of safe and effective family planning methods and called on governments “with the full involvement of young people and with the support of the international community, to give full attention to meeting the reproductive health-care services, information and education needs of adolescents to enable them to deal in a positive and responsible way with their sexuality.”

This session also marked important new directions in U.S. policy. In a statement delivered by Margaret Pollack, head of the U.S. delegation to the CPD, the United States emphasized its commitment to achieving the ICPD goals, “most particularly access to sexual and reproductive health and the promotion and protection of reproductive rights. Further, we agree with the ICPD Programme of Action’s recognition of the critical importance of meeting the needs and protecting the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the largest-ever generation of adolescents.” 

Laura Villa, Ipas youth programming associate, presented an oral statement on behalf of Ipas to the Commission delegates with a special focus on the health and rights of young women. “In the 15 years since your governments met in Cairo, nearly a million women have lost their lives because they lacked safe abortion services. Almost half were under the age of 25.” Villa went on to urge governments to actively involve young people in dialogue about sexuality and reproductive health. “The only way to reduce abortion-related maternal mortality is to break down the taboo that shrouds women’s experiences with abortion in secrecy and to provide women and girls with comprehensive reproductive health services that include sexuality education and comprehensive abortion care.” Along with other youth presenters, Laura Villa also spoke at a luncheon organized for delegates by the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

A critical theme of the Commission’s meeting was the role of the ICPD Programme of Action in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. With sponsorship from the Government of Norway, Ipas organized a side-panel on this theme with partners from Family Care International, Action Canada for Population and Development, and Catholics for Choice. Helga Fogstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), made a strong plea for increased resources: “We need to help policymakers and other stakeholders understand the impacts of increasing coverage of sexual and reproductive health services, as well as enhancing sexual and reproductive rights. We need to be clever and smart in convincing them of the cost-benefit ratio of these investments….”Speaking on the same panel, Barbara Crane, Ipas executive vice president, reminded delegates and observers, “As many of you know, abortion has been one of the most difficult issues to negotiate since it first arose in the preparatory process for ICPD in 1992. It is also an issue on which both the Cairo and Beijing conferences made a huge, historic and very practical difference for women — identifying abortion as a public health issue, and affirming that where abortion is legal, it should be safe and, at Beijing, that punitive abortion laws should be reviewed.”

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For more information, contact media@ipas.org