They Now Call Population Control “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights”
The term “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” or SRHR, did not appear out of nowhere. It grew out of a political problem.
For years, the United Nations and Western governments spoke openly about “population control.” But that language generated resistance, particularly from developing countries that had every reason to distrust wealthy nations telling poorer nations that they had too many children. Worse, population programs in the 1970s and 1980s became associated with coercive practices, including forced or pressured contraception and sterilization. Even UNFPA now acknowledges that the move away from population targets came partly in response to abuses connected with population-control policies.
So the vocabulary changed.
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Instead of controlling populations, the UN increasingly spoke about “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” and eventually “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The language sounded softer. More personal. More rooted in health and individual rights.
One of the central figures in that transformation was Nafis Sadik, the longtime executive director of the United Nations Population Fund and Secretary-General of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. Sadik aggressively promoted the reproductive-rights framework that came to dominate UN population policy. Cairo became the turning point.
The 1994 conference did not simply update population policy. It changed its vocabulary and architecture. UNFPA itself says Cairo “introduced the concepts of sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights” and advanced a new definition of population policy centered on reproductive health and women’s empowerment.
But Cairo also exposed the limits of what governments would accept.
Pro-abortion governments and activists did not get an international right to abortion. Paragraph 8.25 of the ICPD Program of Action states clearly that abortion must never be promoted as a method of family planning and that changes concerning abortion can only occur at the national or local level through the legislative process.
In Cairo, governments reached consensus because abortion remained a matter of national sovereignty. “Reproductive rights” referred to rights already recognized in international law. Cairo did not create a new human right to abortion. No UN human-rights treaty has created one since.
But the story did not end in Cairo.
Over the next three decades, UN agencies, treaty-monitoring committees, donor governments and abortion organizations steadily expanded the meaning of SRHR beyond what governments negotiated in 1994.
A revealing moment came in 2001 during preparations for the UN Special Session on Children. Canadian diplomat Andras Vamos-Goldman acknowledged that when Canadian negotiators used the phrase “reproductive health services,” they understood it to include abortion. Other countries might understand the phrase differently, he conceded, but Canada did not.
There, in a few sentences, sits the problem that has followed SRHR language ever since. Governments can agree to an ambiguous phrase while powerful governments, agencies and activists later define that phrase to include abortion.
The expansion continued.
In 2016, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued General Comment 22 and interpreted sexual and reproductive health broadly under the right to health. In 2018, the Guttmacher-Lancet Commission produced an even more expansive definition of SRHR, explicitly incorporating abortion and a sweeping concept of sexual autonomy.
Then came the World Health Organization (WHO).
Its 2022 Abortion care guideline recommended full decriminalization of abortion and opposed numerous legal restrictions, including gestational limits, waiting periods and third-party authorization requirements. Those recommendations do not constitute international law. Governments never negotiated them. WHO nevertheless presents them as health policy standards.
The WHO strategy has continued to develop. As I noted earlier this year, WHO seminars now treat abortion decriminalization as a policy objective and offer governments, activists and bureaucracies practical frameworks for changing abortion laws and policies. WHO’s Global Abortion Policies Database also compares national laws against WHO recommendations, placing countries that protect unborn children under continuing international scrutiny.
And now we arrive at September 2026.
WHO has designated the entire month, September 1 through September 30, as “World Sexual and Reproductive Health Month.” WHO says SRHR includes information and services concerning sexuality, contraception, pregnancy, fertility care and childbirth.
And abortion.
Not hidden in a footnote.
Not buied in an obscure technical paper.
WHO places abortion directly inside its description of sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The month began September 2 with a flagship online event on the “past, present and future” of SRHR. WHO has filled the calendar with webinars, seminars and discussions on contraception, sexual health and other subjects. On September 28, it will host an event titled “From Guidelines to Collective Action: WHO Resources for Comprehensive Abortion Care at a Critical Time.” I’ll be there.
And tat title tells us plenty.
This is no longer simply an argument over terminology. WHO has built an institutional structure around a term governments never agreed would create an international right to abortion.
That is an incredibly important distinction.
Maternal health matters. Prenatal care matters. Safe childbirth matters. Treatment for infertility matters. Protecting women from violence matters. None of those things requires accepting abortion as a human right.
Yet bundling them together under SRHR creates the impression that governments must accept the entire package or somehow oppose women’s health.
They do not.
Thirty-two years after Cairo, the basic legal truth remains exactly where governments left it. There is no international right to abortion. Abortion policy remains within the sovereign authority of nations. WHO guidelines cannot rewrite treaties. Webinars cannot create international law. A month of seminars cannot turn an ideological interpretation into a human right.
The terminology changed.
The strategy expanded.
The pressure intensified.
But the child in the womb did not change at all. And we’ll be there to continue to make that distinction.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
