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In response to a leader of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who declared that family breakdown is a triumph for human rights, World Congress of Families Managing Director Lawrence (Larry) Jacobs said he was only surprised that UNFPA is now willing to admit what has always been part of its agenda.

At a recent colloquium in Mexico City, Arie Hoekman, a UNFPA representative from the Netherlands, told participants that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births represent the triumph of “human rights” over “patriarchy.” Jacobs stated, “Ironically, the UNFPA ignores international law and their own UN declaration on the basic human rights of children and the natural family as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Section 16 of the United Nations UDHR adopted in 1948 states that, ‘the family is the natural fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.” Furthermore, UDHR states, “men and women of full age, without any limitation, due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.’”

Jacobs charged: “Deconstructing the natural family has always been high on the agenda of groups like UNFPA. Ignoring international and domestic laws, they pursue this goal relentlessly through funding and promoting abortion, contraception and coercive population control – such as China’s one-child-per-family policy.

Jacobs continued: “There are reams of data showing that children from broken homes, either through divorce or failure to form families, have much higher levels of drug and alcohol abuse, crime and mental illness than their counterparts from intact families. But, perhaps Hoekman thinks these social pathologies also represent the triumph of human rights over patriarchy.”

Jacobs concluded: “If Hoekman thinks fatherless families are an advance for human rights, he should spend time in America’s inner cities, where they are the norm and life is exceedingly dangerous.” Jacobs also noted that unattached males in their teens and twenties drive the crime problem in most developed nations.

“Even U.S. President Barack Obama recognizes the importance of two married parents at home. As he stated during his speech on Father’s Day, “We...need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one.”

The WCF is a periodic international gathering of all people from all nations to celebrate the “natural” family and affirm the truths found in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 16:3 of the universal declaration of human rights states, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” Larry Jacobs says that this simple statement on the family has “brought together our international pro-family movement, a coalition of 250 groups with people from more than 65 countries. The diversity of religious beliefs is striking. Some are the most ardent supporters of their faiths, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Others are atheists and agnostics that recognize and support these universal truths about the family.

“In America many of the groups that partner with us include pro-family or pro-life groups and those usually associated with Catholics, Lutherans, Orthodox or the Christian right. But, in other nations, perhaps like in the Netherlands, those groups or coalitions may have no religious beliefs at all and may not agree on all issues of public policy. For instance, we have inspired a new NGO in Japan which is completely secular and atheistic but has adopted our definition of the natural family and supports our efforts to help children worldwide.

The World Congress of Families was founded under the direction of Dr. Allan Carlson, a social scientist and historian after a trip to Russia in 1995. While in Russia, he heard testimony and witnessed the societal vacuum created after the collapse of communism; he witnessed firsthand the problems caused by the Soviet destruction of two vital institutions for children and civilization, namely the family and the church. The World Congress of Families was birthed out of this realization and with this universal goal in mind: “The World Congress of families exists to help children become the mature and responsible citizens that every nation needs and desires to succeed.” Jacobs says the WCF coalition knows that families are the best solutions to all of the major crises facing the world, i.e. strong, married, intact families are more economically productive, environmentally friendly (use less resources), socially stable, medically healthier and better for children and adults than any other alternative family structure. “We need to help all the mothers out there who are raising these kids by themselves; the mothers who drop them off at school, go to work, pick up them up in the afternoon,work another shift, get dinner, make lunches, pay the bills, fix the house, and all the other things it takes both parents to do. So many of these women are doing a heroic job, but they need support. They need another parent. Their children need another parent. That's what keeps their foundation strong. It's what keeps the foundation of our country strong.

I too, know the importance of families and strong families. My parents were divorced when I was three years old and my single Mom sacrificed much to raise her boy and send him on to Yale University. It is in this spirit that we gather families and leaders together from all over the world. Not to condemn families that have fallen short of the ideal (like my own) but to hold up this ideal of the two-parent, married intact family as a better way of living for our children and our world. Again I’ll quote Barack Obama on the importance of the two-parent, married intact family. “You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled - doubled - since we were children. We know the statistics - that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”

Jacobs concludes: “Ultimately, the future of all of our nations (socially, politically and economically) and the hope for our children, rests not on banking bail-out or fiscal stimulus but on the success of pro-family efforts, The World Congress of Families seeks to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the ‘seedbed’ of civil society. WCF is a project of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (www.profam.org). To date, there have been four World Congresses of Families – Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004) and Warsaw, Poland (2007). A fifth World Congress of Families will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 10-12, 2009. Marriage, the natural family, the sanctity of human life and the consequences of population control all will be major topics of discussion at World Congress of Families V in Amsterdam.

For more information on World Congress of Families, visit www.worldcongress.org or www.worldcongress.nl . To register for World Congress of Families V go to: www.worldcongress.org/WCF5/wcf5.reg.mem.htm. Communications Director is Don Feder, +508-405-1337 or dfeder@rcn.com.