Inaccurate Reporting Distorts Bush Administration's Position on Population and Development Issues

By Jeanne E. Head, R.N.

Press reports emanating from the recent preparatory meeting for the Fifth Asian Pacific Population Conference have totally distorted the Bush Administration's positions regarding previous UN conferences. This is particularly true for the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and its five-year follow-up.

Headlines scream that the Bush Administration is "threatening to pull out of a landmark United Nations population accord." Not only is the reporting inaccurate, it can only be described as both partisan and sensational. Rather than deal with the real Bush Administration position, many stories obviously took their cues from pro-abortionists such as Tim Wirth (Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs in the Clinton Administration). Starting with the ICPD, Wirth was the initial enforcer and possibly the architect of the Clinton Administration's drive to make abortion a fundamental human right worldwide through these international accords.

In truth, what the Bush Administration said last month in Bangkok, Thailand, is nothing new. It is consistent with stands taken during negotiations for the Child Summit that started in 2001 and ended in May 2002, the World Health Assembly in May 2002, and the August/September 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development.

The Bush Administration has steadfastly refused to unequivocally accept or reaffirm language in these documents that could be construed to include or promote abortion. It has been successful in modifying, defining, or eliminating the offensive language related to abortion.

It is these successes and the refusal to go back to the position promoted by the Clinton Administration that explains the overheated rhetoric.

A source in the U.S. delegation who was in Bangkok told NRL News that they "did not ever say that they were in any sense withdrawing from ICPD" which, despite its serious flaws, contains a great deal of meaningful and positive elements. These include the promotion of the human rights of women, an emphasis on a holistic approach to health care, on education, and on the elimination of poverty. Clearly, the Bush Administration would not want to back away from any of these goals.

The delegation only said that it would be difficult for the U.S. to totally reaffirm the ICPD due to its abortion-related language. The ICPD was one of a number of documents listed for reaffirmation at the Bangkok meeting. It included the even more troublesome five-year follow-up to the ICPD-- "Cairo +5" -- which, in addition to reiterating much of the ICPD abortion language, contains language which calls for the training and equipping of health care providers to ensure that abortion is accessible. (It did not even contain a conscience clause.)

If you believed press accounts, the Cairo document was the product of a consensus. In fact, it was so controversial that 46 countries felt compelled to list reservations and/or make interpretative statements at the time of its adoption, indicating that they did not fully agree with its contents or were concerned by its interpretation. Over 30 of these countries made reference to chapters or language on reproductive rights and health.

The Holy See, for example, partially joined the consensus on the good parts of the document relating to women, health care, education, and development. But it did not join consensus on whole chapters of the document containing abortion-related and other troublesome language.

The Bush Administration's determination to stay the course is not much ado about nothing. Pro-abortionists are aggressively seeking to use the UN to enshrine a worldwide "right" to abortion.

A key component of that strategy is ensuring that certain language is weaved into documents, all the while denying the language's real intent. One only has to recall the Child Summit negotiations in June 2001.

A Canadian delegate admitted (for the first time at any of these UN conferences) that reproductive health "services" does indeed include abortion. Other evidence that words matter is a complaint and a Declaration filed against the Bush Administration by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP), a UN non-governmental organization established in 1992 for the express purpose of making abortion a fundamental human right worldwide.

The complaint spells out in detail the CRLP's strategy for using repetition of language in all UN conferences to help establish "a right to abortion in the United States and every other country on earth."

The CRLP believes that establishing abortion as an internationally recognized human right would, among other things, provide an alternative basis for the U.S. courts to invalidate state restrictions on abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

This thrust was made very clear in the Declaration filed with this legal challenge to the Bush Administration's "Mexico City Policy." That policy denies funds to international family planning organizations which refuse to cease and desist from providing abortion, promoting abortion, or work to change the laws in

countries that have restrictions on abortion. In her "Declaration" for the CRLP, Aryeh Neier spelled out the agenda and its importance:

"It has only been recently that discussion of reproductive rights as human rights has occurred at the international level," she wrote. Neier noted that much of the "progress" has been made through various United Nations conferences and summits.

"The current period is a critical one in history for the advocacy of reproductive rights as human rights, including the right to abortion," Neier wrote.

"The gains made throughout the 1990's and the worldwide attention resulting from the Cairo and Beijing Conferences and their five-year reviews all show that momentum is building behind the efforts of the transitional coalitions to give legal protection to abortion. As a result, censorship by the United States of an important piece of this advocacy will likely have a devastating impact."

The Bush Administration will take enormous criticism from the media, but it clearly understands the importance of refusing to endorse abortion-related language in these UN documents.

It is to be noted that, as currently drafted, the Bangkok Asian and Pacific Population draft document reportedly contains very little emphasis on poverty eradication, despite the fact that the theme of the conference is "Population and Poverty."

If the promoters of abortion are truly interested in women's development, they should join President Bush in his Administration's constant advocacy for women's education and holistic health care -- the real needs of women in developing countries. That is what this conference should be about, not the promotion of abortion as a solution to poverty. Poor women constantly voice their desire for a whole lot more.