Dear Dr. Brundtland, We congratulate you on your assumption of the post of director general of the World health Organisation. We are a coalition of women health activists who have worked for many years for women’s rights to safe, legal and voluntary birth control and abortion services as part of comprehensive health care. In so doing, we have taken on the double challenge of confronting anti-abortion forces and population control interests, for both restrict women’s freedom to make their own decisions.

We appreciate your commitment to fight poverty and to bring health to the core of the development agenda, as you stressed in your speech to the 51st World Health Assembly, May 13, 1998. You addressed the striking imbalances between the health of people in developing and developed countries, and the obligation to give priority to health and to the equitable distribution of health services. You also pointed to the critical threats that globalisation is posing to health and environment. We share these concerns and it fills us with hope that the world’s most senior health official commits herself’ to the reduction of poverty and a “development underpinned by the values of equity, human dignity and human rights.”

We would like to share our concerns over the predominant ideology that has been guiding many development and health policies of supranational bodies, governments and private organisations. This is the widespread belief that so-called ‘over population’ is a major cause of poverty, migration, environmental deterioration and other serious problems.

We are concerned because the idea that ‘over-population’ exists, that there is a definable ‘too many’ people and an objectively measurable carrying capacity of this planet, is no longer considered a hypothesis or one (debatable) view of the world, but has turned into something like a natural law, a scientific fact that is beyond doubt. We considered the concept of over-population part of an ideology and not a hard fact. This way of thinking and reflecting on problems is historically deeply rooted in racism and eugenics. Population growth has often served as a convenient scapegoat in international and national politics and continues to divert attention from grave problems such as poverty, power imbalances, inequality, discrimination, exploitation and the practices and parties responsible for these.

Population control cannot and should never be used as a tool for reducing poverty or improving the health of poor people. It neither nurtures values such as equity, human dignity and human rights nor addresses existing inequalities. On the contrary, the population control framework has played a powerful role in distorting health and social policy in terms of both foreign assistance and government policies. In countries such as India and Bangladesh, population control is viewed as more important than primary health care, absorbing from one-quarter to one-third of annual health budgets. We strongly support people’s right to family planning, but it should be an integral part of general health services, and must not substitute or displace them.

We are concerned that this ideology of population control has also gained a foothold in the Human Reproduction Programme( HRP) of WHO and is reflected in the contraceptive research WHO is undertaking. In 1996, David Griffin, WHO’s coordinator of research in immuno-contraceptives and team leader for technology development and assessment, wrote an article on the development of anti-fertility ‘vaccines’ for the American Journal of Reproductive Immunology. It started with a long discussion of demographic figures and ‘runaway’ population growth thus reaffirming a population control framework that has been there from the very beginning of the research in the early 1970s.

Anti-fertility ‘vaccines’ or immunological contraceptives have been conceived of with a view to bring down birth rates, i. e. in a population control framework, and their design result in a high potential for abuse. We consider this an unacceptable feature of a contraceptive, because it threatens people’s reproductive self-determination, particularly that of women in Third World Countries, for whom it is being developed. Moreover, immuno-contraceptives can be predicted to have an efficacy and adverse effect profile which we consider unacceptable from both the medical and user perspective. WHO’s Human Reproduction Programme has been taking a leading role in developing such an immunological contraceptive.

Five years ago we started an international campaign to call for a stop to all research on anti-fertility ‘vaccines’. More than 480 groups and organisations and many individuals worldwide endorsed this call. Our public challenge of the research has since then fostered a debate in many organisations and also within the research community. Various health professionals have critically discussed and questioned this line of contraceptive research. Moreover, the Indian government decided to lower the priority level of immuno-contraceptive research and cut its budget. The International Development and Research Centre in Canada stopped funding this research line altogether. In line of these developments, we find it very unfortunate and worrisome that WHO, and its Gender Advisory Panel insist on carrying on with the development of such a contraceptive and that Mr. Griffin continues to emphasise the population control framework of the research.

We are worried about the direction WHO seems to have taken. How does WHO’s renewed commitment to strive for Health for All relate to population control ideology ? With the forced cut-down of budgets for general health care, health infrastructures have collapsed in many poor countries. On the contrary, with the greater focus being given since ICPD 1994 to family planning and reproductive health, national budgets are being distorted. Regarding your commitment to let WHO make a difference, we think it would make a real difference if WHO committed itself to advocating the worldwide reorientation of contraceptive research away from a population control-centred to a truly people-centred framework. It would certainly lend credibility to WHO’s endeavour to give priority to equitable health care systems.

We would be happy to have a more detailed discussion with you in which we can exchange our views or respective arguments on the questions raised.

“Stop anti-fertility ‘vaccines’! International Campaign against Population Control and Abusive, Hazardous Contraceptives.” c/o Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights , NZ Vooburgwal 32, NL-10112 RZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands”