“The Moscow Demographic Summit: Family and The Future of Humankind” concluded with the adoption of a declaration demanding that governments everywhere adopt pro-family demographic policies. The Declaration was adopted by participants at the June 29-30 Summit held at the Russian State Social University, Russia’s largest university.

Translated from Russian, The Declaration states in part:

“We, participants of the Moscow Demographic Summit, representing families from various social, ethnic and religious communities, leading experts in the field of the family and demography, public activists, NGOs, leaders of parents associations, representatives of the leading business, educational and diplomatic institutions, members of national Governments and Parliaments and other responsible forces of the civil society, representing 65 countries of the world, hereby declare that the Natural Family is the basic unit of society and the fundamental social value, that is a necessary prerequisite for the very existence of world civilizations and the whole humankind.”

“We express our deep concern about the dangers of the approaching worldwide depopulation. Despite wrong and biased information about ‘overpopulation’ threat promoted by some mass media and international institutions, in reality already for several decades in a row we have been witnessing a global process of demographic degradation…. In the nearest historical period, the negative demographic trends can bring about extinction of whole peoples, destruction of States, and disappearance of unique cultures and civilizations. Even according to conservative estimates by the UN, within next three decades, the total fertility rate will go down below the population replacement level all over the world. In reality, it can happen much earlier, thus making the whole world community face the unprecedented social and historical problem of humankind survival.”

“We are alarmed by the fact that the family institution is in a state of grave social crisis which consists in the destruction of universal family, conjugal and parental roles based on traditional family values; in the disruption of the reproductive function of the family; in an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, caused by the imposition of contraceptive thinking (in terms of safe sex) and destructive premarital and extramarital sex patterns; in widespread divorce; in the spreading of cohabitation without marriage; in increasing numbers of single-parent families; a wave of social deviations (abortions, homosexuality, pedophilia, drug addiction, refusal of marriage and childbearing (the child-free phenomenon), prostitution, pornography, etc.); disruption of the process of socialization of young generations; cutting of ties among relatives and alienation of different generations within one family, etc.

We call on the governments of all nations and on international institutions to develop immediately a pro-family demographic policy and to adopt a special international pro-family strategy and action plan aimed at consolidating family and marriage, protecting human life from conception to natural death, increasing birth rates, and averting the menace of depopulation.”

Click here to read the Declaration of the Moscow Demographic Summit in its entirety.