While President Obama was putting the finishing touches to a speech addressed to Muslims and delivered at an Egyptian university yesterday, an Egyptian doctor was the subject of a speech and an award at a United Nations Population Fund ceremony in New York (June 1). UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Dr Mahmoud Fathalla richly deserved the prize for making “a major impact in the field of family planning, reproductive rights and ending maternal deaths.”

Dr Fathalla (pictured here at last year's Women Deliver conference) is a former advisor to both the World health organisation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and in 1974, established the Egyptian Fertility Care Society, one of the first family planning organizations in the Arab world, according to a UN press release. One can see why he would, ahem, appeal to UNFPA, whose mission seems to be to reduce world fertility.

Dr Fathalla shared the honours with Movimiento Comunal Nicaragüense (MCN), created in 1978 to boost living conditions in Nicaragua through social and community development, gender equality and environmental protection.

Drawing inspiration from the work of the award winners, Mr. Ban called for “a world where women do not die needlessly in childbirth; where girls get the education they deserve; where young people are protected from HIV; and where couples can decide how many children to have.”

The last item is somewhat ironic because, as C-FAM -- a group which takes a close interest in the reproductive health scene -- points out, UNFPA once gave the award in question to Qian Xinzhong, “who, as minister of China’s State Family Planning Commission was responsible for overseeing China’s draconian one-child policy, which included forced abortion and mandatory sterilization.”

C-FAM reports:

In his acceptance speech for the award, Dr. Mahmoud Fathalla called the “powerlessness” of women a “serious health hazard” and lamented how frequently, women were “coerced into motherhood by denying them not only the power and means to control and regulate their fertility but also by denying them choices in life apart from childbearing and childrearing.”

Unfortunately, he does not have a great deal of faith in contraception to control fertility. According to C-FAM, in a 2005 speech he stated:

“Contraception may decrease the need for abortion, but contraception will never eliminate the need for abortion…[W]ith the current levels of use effectiveness of contraceptive methods there is a very simple mathematical model that every year there will be between 10 and 20 million unwanted pregnancies among contraceptive users.” Fathalla concluded, “The real social choice is not between abortion and no abortion, but will for practical purpose be to have it under the law or against the law, to have it safe or to have it unsafe.”

With the UN still mesmerised by fertility control, any means is acceptable.