Delegates To Stick With Cairo Pact, Avoid Abortion Fight

Delegates to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women are close to an agreement on abortion and reproductive rights that will prevent the all-out battle on these subjects that nearly wrecked last year’s population conference in Cairo - principally because neither the United States nor the Vatican is interested in a fight at this time.

Though representatives of European nations still were pushing for a more liberal stance and some developing countries wanted a more conservative posture, negotiators for both the United States and the Vatican Saturday said they would settle for a reaffirmation of the compromise position on abortion and reproductive rights worked out in Cairo at the World Conference on Population and Development.

The Cairo agreement endorsed making safe abortions available to women in nations where abortion is not against national or local laws; it stressed simultaneously that abortion should not be promoted as a method of family planning and that recourse to abortion should be reduced by making expanded and improved family planning services available.

The peace between the Americans and the church seemingly assures that there will be no strong movement here to roll back or broaden those provisions in the document that 40,000 women’s advocates came to China to produce.

“This meeting should be focused on the real problems of the world’s women, not just stuck on a few issues,” Janne Haaland Matlary, one of the Vatican’s chief negotiators at the women’s conference, said in an interview. “We are very happy with the public statements made by the Americans.”

Geraldine Ferraro, vice chairman of the U.S. delegation, said that “we want to maintain the Cairo document. We don’t want to go back, and we don’t want to reopen it. Our delegation is reaching out to the Holy See, reaching out to the Islamic countries which have any problem” to avoid conflict.

“We have to find common ground, find a consensus,” Ferraro said. “I think we’ll have it before we leave here.”

U.S. delegates say their top priorities are to broaden the understanding of women’s rights as universal human rights, and to push for women’s equality in access to health care, education and employment. Vatican negotiators say their priorities are to urge equal access to education, to advocate greater rewards for women who stay in the home, and to oppose the preference for boys that leads to abortions and killings of girls in many countries.

Like the Cairo document, the language being negotiated here will not be binding on the 180-plus nations participating in the drafting process. Nevertheless, delegates and activists say, it is of tremendous importance for setting moral standards and influencing the social climate in countries around the world.

“In the U.N. context, if you repeat language more than once, you lock it in,” said Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services. “Don’t try to get me into a box on the reproductive health issue. There is much here that goes beyond Cairo” in other areas. “We already have achieved considerable consensus on topics that have never before been so substantively dealt with in a U.N. document.”