The World Congress of Families (WCF) report that the Moscow Demographic Summit: "Family and the Future of Humankind" held on June 29-30 was a great success. According to the WCF website for the event this was the first ever International Demographic Summit to be held on Earth and the first time an international Pro-Life and Pro-Family event of this scale took place in Russia. It was held the Russian State Social University, Russia's largest university. More than 1,000 participants took part in the Summit: 300 foreign guests (including top demography & family researchers, scientists and activists, US Congressmen and Senators) and 700 participants from all over Russia and the CIS.The summit concluded with the adoption of a Declaration demanding that governments everywhere adopt pro-family demographic policies.
Translated from Russian, The Declaration states in part:
Click here to read the Declaration of the Moscow Demographic Summit in its entiriety"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."
