The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) has come to represent shorthand for the shift from family planning programs funded based on macrodemographic variables to focus global attention on sexual and reproductive health and rights and on the lives and opportunities of individual women.

This shorthand ignores language in the ICPD Programme of Action and the Cairo Consensus that was forged, acknowledging that enhancing individual health and rights would contribute to the demographic transition.

Country policies since ICPD have expanded to incorporate components of the Cairo Consensus, focusing on population and sustainable development, with an expanded focus on reproductive health, individual choice, and women’s empowerment. Yet, the global discourse on “population” has grown more toxic.

As we near the final years of the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda, we argue that the continued polarization of views about the role of population in addressing the world’s most urgent global health and public policy issues can be bridged by referring back to the comprehensive, inclusive, and progressive ICPD Programme of Action.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus famously theorized that population growth would always outpace food supply, resulting in human misery unless strict controls on reproduction were introduced. Since Malthus,1 debates about the role of population dynamics in socioeconomic development policies and programs have been lively and contentious.2–5 Feminist academics and advocates have raised important concerns about the extent to which population policies that include demographic goals are susceptible to coercion and violation of human rights in programming. As a result, the inclusion of population dynamics in the global development discourse is viewed as problematic,6–10 with suspicion leveled at the terms family planning (FP)11 and “voluntary” FP.12 The critique has been influential13; a consequence has been to effectively remove population dynamics from the …