Gargantuan international conferences replete with diplomats, "international
civil servants," various "nongovernmental organization"
(NGO) representatives, and the world press have been a staple feature of
world politics since the Second World War. One does not fear sinning against
charity by suggesting that many of these extravaganzas (in which the international
ruling class cavorts, off-hours, in the sybaritic style to which it has
become accustomed) are, in the Bard's familiar words, "a tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But there
are exceptions, and they can be important.
The Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which
produced the "Helsinki Accords" in 1975, was one such exception.
When Leonid Brezhnev signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, he probably
thought he was taking out a ninety-nine-year lease on Stalin's external
empire. As things turned out, he was signing its death warrant. For "Basket
Three" of the Final Act pledged the signatory nations of Europe and
North America to certain human rights commitments. And those commitments
in turn inspired the formation of "Helsinki monitoring groups,"
which were to become the backbone of the human rights resistance in Central
and Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s: groups that
were essential to the nonviolent collapse of communism in the Revolution
of 1989 and the New Russian Revolution of 1991.
The September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
in Cairo might be another such exception, with yet another ironic outcome.
The UN bureaucrats, Scandinavian politicos, Clinton Administration "global
affairs" mavens, radical environmentalists, feminists, and population
controllers who planned the conference intended it to be nothing less than
the Great Cairo Turkey Shoot: a political slaughter in which the enemies
of "individual autonomy," "sustainable growth," "global
carrying capacity," "reproductive rights," "gender
equity," abortion-on-demand, and the sexual revolution would be utterly,
decisively routed. But they were not. Indeed, the Cairo conference just
may have marked a turning point in the international debate over population
and development. It is too early to know for sure, but it is just possible
that the radicals' attempt to take the Cairo conference by storm set in
motion moral and cultural dynamics that will, over time, result in the
defeat of the radicals' agenda.
Which, if it were to come to pass, would be a bouleversement of world-
historical proportions.
II
Cairo was the third in a series of decennial international population
conferences. The first International Conference on Population was held
in 1974 at Budapest, and the second (under the enlarged banner of "Population
and Development") was convened in Mexico City in 1984. Planning for
both of these meetings, within the UN bureaucracy and among the thousands
of NGO activists who participate in UN-sponsored programs, was dominated
by strident doomsayers and hard-core population controllers of the Garrett
Hardin/Paul Ehrlich ("the battle to feed all humanity is over")
school. That people were essentially a problem, even a pollutant, rather
than a resource; that social, political, economic, and ecological catastrophe
was right around the corner, unless drastic steps were taken to stabilize
and then reverse world population trends- these were the themes, familiar
to even the most casual student of the American anti-natalist lobby, that
set the agenda for Budapest and Mexico City.
As it happened, these notions, and the prescriptions for coercive, governmentally
enforced programs of fertility reduction that flowed from them, did not
sit well with many of the putative beneficiaries of "population control":
namely, the countries of the developing world. At Budapest, for example,
the population technocrats were challenged both empirically and culturally:
empirically, in that it was made plain that population patterns varied
widely around the world, as the result of a complex interaction of economic,
social, and cultural factors; and culturally, in that it became clear that
there were many different understandings of how population issues should
be addressed, even among those who shared the belief that there was a "population
problem." "Development is the best contraceptive" became
the slogan (crude, but not inaccurate) that the Third World counterposed
to the Hardin/Ehrlich anti-natalist hysteria of the well-to-do "North."
Ten years later, the population controllers suffered an outright defeat
at Mexico City. Not satisfied with the results of their massive efforts
to export mechanical and chemical means of contraception to the Third World
(some of which had met considerable resistance on both moral- cultural
and medical grounds), UN and private sector population agencies had increasingly
turned to abortion as a means of family planning and population control.
The Chinese policy of coercive abortion was, of course, the most draconian
of such enterprises, but its extremism was merely the cruelest face of
a general policy actively supported by the anti-natalists throughout the
developing world. The population controllers came to Mexico City expecting
the conference to give its sanction to abortion-on-demand, in the name
of family planning. Yet they were soundly rebuffed. For the conference,
with vigorous support from the Reagan Administration, adopted a final report
that stated flatly that abortion was not a legitimate means of population
control.
This was an ideological defeat for the population controllers, not
least because the attention focused on the brutality of the Chinese program
graphically demonstrated the lengths to which the controllers were willing
to go; having seen what lay at the end of the road, some countries were
prepared to question the legitimacy of embarking on the journey in the
first place. But the Mexico City conference also had serious financial
consequences: it resulted in restrictions on funding for abortion in UN
programs; it eliminated such funding from the population components of
many nations' foreign aid budgets; and, on the domestic front, it became
the international legal instrument with which the Reagan and Bush Administrations
forbade federal support for any public or private aid program that included
abortion among its family planning activities.
As may be imagined, all of this stuck, hard, in the collective craw
of the population controllers at the UN and World Bank, and among such
major activist NGOs as Planned Parenthood of America and the International
Planned Parenthood Federation. For not only had they suffered an ideological
and financial defeat at Mexico City; they also seemed to understand, however
dimly, that they had suffered a moral drubbing as well. It seemed that
many people-by their lights unenlightened, authoritarian, conservative,
to be sure, but influential nonetheless-believed that the population controllers
were not only wrong, they were bad. And since a powerful conviction of
its inherent righteousness has been perhaps the chief psychological characteristic
of the population control movement for well over a century, it was this
moral rejection that cut most deeply, and inflamed the controllers' determination
to "go beyond Mexico City" at the next decennial conference.
The U.S. presidential election of November 1992 promised the population
controllers relief, and indeed more than relief. Bill Clinton and Al Gore
had, after all, run on the most radical "social issues" platform
in American history, committing themselves to federal funding of abortion-
on-demand in the U.S. at any stage of a pregnancy; deploring "explosive
population growth" in the Third World; and pledging to use federal
tax dollars to fund "greater family planning efforts" in U.S.
foreign aid programs. Moreover, the Democratic Party's most vocal activists
included men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, who were deeply committed
to securing, in American law and public policy, the sexual revolution's
core principle of individual autonomy and its severance of sexual relations
from marriage. Little wonder, then, that the controllers, determined as
they were to "go beyond Mexico City," read the electoral entrails
of November 3, 1992 as a mandate for radical change in U.S. population
policy and, a posteriori, in the agenda of the third International Conference
on Population and Development, which was to be held in Cairo in September
1994.
Their expectations were met in full. Indeed, among all the twists and
turns of Clinton Administration policy on issues both foreign and domestic,
one constant has been an unyielding commitment to abortion-on- demand at
home and massive efforts at "population control" abroad. On Clinton's
first day in office, which happened to coincide with the twentieth annual
"March for Life" in Washington, he signed five executive orders
widening the scope of federal involvement with, and funding of, elective
abortion. Rigorous pro-Roe litmus tests were applied to all Clinton nominees
to the federal judiciary; and few doubted that the Administration wished
to see abortion included as a mandated "service" in any national
health care reform. Nor, in a time of fiscal restraint, did the Administration
hesitate to beef up the population control portion of its foreign assistance
budget. Thus ten months after taking office, the President's chief foreign
aid administrator, J. Brian Atwood, announced a five-year, $75 million
commitment to fund the activities of the International Planned Parenthood
Federation. (Mr. Atwood defended these and other population control expenditures
on the bizarre grounds that the "core" of the chaos in Somalia,
in which U.S. troops were then embroiled, was overpopulation. Somali vital
statistics may not be the world's finest, but a reasonable estimate is
that Somalia, whose territory is a little larger than that of California,
Washington state, Maryland, and Massachusetts combined, had a population
in 1992 of some seven million, forty million fewer than the aggregate population
of those four states.)
It has never been clear whether the key players in the Clinton Administration
really believed that the 42.8 percent of the popular vote they garnered
in 1992 constituted a genuine mandate for radical change, or whether that
slim plurality impelled the more ideologically fervent members of the Administration
to strike while an iron likely to cool quickly was still hot. Whatever
the answer, it is indisputably the case that the Administration, led by
Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth, decided that
merely "going beyond Mexico City" was an insufficiently grand
goal for the Cairo conference. In league with several Scandinavian and
West European countries, UN and World Bank population technocrats, and
feminist, anti-natalist, and environmentalist NGOs, the Clintonites sought
to engineer a dramatic shift in the focus of the Cairo conference. The
packaging ("Population and Development") would remain, but the
content would be dramatically altered-with the earth's "carrying capacity,"
"gender equality, equity, and empowerment of women," and "reproductive
rights" supplanting mere "population and development" as
the issues of moment. Which amounted, in brief, to a brazen attempt to
use international law and the leverage of Western foreign aid programs
to establish the sexual revolution, as lived in Stockholm and Hollywood,
as the model of humane culture for the twenty-first century.
This radically altered agenda first came into focus in April 1994,
when the third meeting of the Cairo conference preparatory committee (Prep-
Com III) took place in New York. Among other things, this meeting underscored
the ferocity of Undersecretary Wirth and his allies, who were taking no
chances that open debate might put sand in the gears of their political
machine. The chairman of Prep-Com III, as he would be of the Cairo conference,
was Dr. Fred Sai, usually introduced as the "representative of Ghana,"
but in real life (so to speak), the president of the International Planned
Parenthood Federation. Nongovernmental members of the U.S. delegation to
the New York session included Bella Abzug, Jeannie Rosoff, president of
the Alan Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood),
Patricia Waak, director of the Audubon Society's population program, and
staff members of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation,
two major funders of population control activism. Those who wished to challenge
the regnant Clintonite orthodoxies were treated as mere irritants. A seminar
sponsored by the United States Catholic Conference, for instance, a registered
UN NGO, was denied space in the UN itself; the organizers of the seminar
were forbidden to post notice of their meeting; UN officials and population
activist NGOs contrived to schedule two other seminars at the same time
as the USCC meeting; and meanwhile the shell organization "Catholics
for a Free Choice" was given room to operate within the UN complex.
Moreover, this ugliness spilled over from the periphery into the Prep-
Com's formal sessions. When Msgr. Diarmuid Martin of the Vatican delegation
criticized the proposed Cairo draft document for its ethical hollowness,
he was chastised publicly from the chair by Dr. Sai, who complained that
the Holy See was trying to foist its notions of sexual morality on the
world. Sai's remarks were boisterously applauded by a gallery packed with
anti-natalist NGO activists. (Sai's boorish conduct toward the Holy See
delegation may have set something of a record for a UN committee chairman,
but his anti-Vatican bias was hardly original in substance. At an earlier
UN session, Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway had complained
bitterly of obstacles placed in the Cairo conference's path by a "small
state with no natural inhabitants.")
It was no surprise, then, that Prep-Com III produced a truly radical
draft document for the Cairo conference, in which only six of 118 pages
were devoted to the conference's ostensible topic of "population and
development," with the bulk of the rest given over to proposals for
a lifestyle revolution of awesome proportions.
Not that the classic population controllers did not do well at Prep-Com
III. There was no serious challenge to the shibboleths of "overpopulation,"
and the controllers got a pledge of serious money, the draft document having
committed the international community to a massive increase in funding
for population control activities, up from the current $6 billion to $17
billion by 2000. (The increase was to be paid for by increased American,
Japanese, and Scandinavian contributions to the UN Fund for Population
Activities [UNFPA], as well as by cutbacks in UN-sponsored education, health
care, industrial development, and disaster relief.)
Still, it was the philosophical shift embedded in the Cairo draft document
that marked a sea change in the debate. For the draft document's view of
the human condition and the human prospect was rooted in that concept of
the radically autonomous individual with which Americans have become all
too familiar through the sexual revolution, the deconstructionist decay
of the American academy, and the philosophical musings of several Supreme
Court justices. "Choice," the mantra of U.S. proponents of abortion-on-demand
(along with "gay rights," "alternative forms of marriage,"
and all the rest of it), became the antiphon of the draft Cairo document
produced by Prep-Com III. The results, to put it gently, were striking.
"Marriage" was the dog that didn't bark in the Cairo draft
document. In fact, the only time the word "marriage" appeared
in the draft document's chapter on "the family" was in a passage
deploring "coercion and discrimination in policies and practices related
to marriage." But this was hardly surprising, in that the draft document,
while frequently noting the importance of "the family in its various
forms," said absolutely nothing about the importance of families rooted
in stable marriages for the physical and mental well-being of children.
Nor did the draft document have much else to say about the natural and
moral bond between parents and children and its importance for achieving
many of the document's laudable goals, such as improved health care and
education for youngsters. Indeed, the document sundered the moral relationship
between parents and teenage children by treating sexual activity after
puberty as a "right" to be exercised at will, and by suggesting
that state population and "reproductive health care" agencies
be the primary interlocutors of young men and women coming to grips with
their sexuality.
The Cairo draft document also proposed establishing a new category
of internationally recognized human rights, viz., "reproductive rights,"
of which the right to abortion-on-demand was, not surprisingly, the centerpiece.
Indeed, it seemed at times as if the codification of an internationally
recognized (and, presumably, enforced) "right to abortion" was
the primary goal of the Clinton Administration for Cairo. Shortly before
Prep-Com III, on March 16, 1994, Secretary of State Warren Christopher
had sent a cable to all U.S. diplomatic stations abroad, stating that "the
U.S. believes that access to safe, legal, and voluntary abortion is a fundamental
right of all women," and emphasizing that the U.S. objective at Cairo
was to get "stronger language on the importance" of "abortion
services" into the conference final report. Christopher's cable, for
all its ignorance of the state of the abortion debate in the U.S., at least
had the merit of intelligibility; the draft Cairo document followed the
familiar UN pattern of Orwellian euphemism, in which coercive family planning
policies became "fertility regulation," and abortion-on-demand
was transmuted into "safe motherhood" and "reproductive
rights."
In a contradiction familiar to U.S. veterans of the abortion wars, the
Cairo draft document then married the philosophy of the imperial autonomous
self to a program of large-scale state coercion in the service of "reproductive
rights," "gender equity," and, of course, population control.
Further, the draft document mandated states to override parental prerogatives
(known, in UN-speak, as "social barriers to sexual and reproductive
health information and care") in the matter of adolescent sexual education.
The draft document also called for state intrusion into the doctor-patient
relationship: after warning that "health care providers" must
not "restrict the access of adolescents to the services and information
they need," the document required states to ensure that those "providers"
have the proper "attitudes" toward their teenage patients. One
need not doubt that the "attitudes" to be enforced here were
those of Dr. Joycelyn Elders. (Undersecretary Wirth seemed particularly
exercised on the subject of teenage sexuality. At the conclusion of one
session with a senior Vatican official prior to the Cairo conference, Wirth
is said to have summed up his case in these pellucid terms: "Young
people have to know about their bodies.")
The draft document produced by Prep-Com III also had a nasty totalitarian
edge to it. In a striking passage that reflected the affinity between the
Kultur of Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomasson,
on the one hand, and the agenda of Bella Abzug and International Planned
Parenthood, on the other, governments were instructed to "use the
entertainment media, including radio and television soap operas and drama,
folk theater, and other traditional media" to proselytize for the
draft document's ideology and "program of action." And in order
to insure that the usual male reprobates got the word, the draft document
instructed governments to get the message of "reproductive rights"
and "gender equity" out by instituting programs that "reach
men in their workplaces, at home, and where they gather for recreation,"
while adolescent boys should be "reached through schools, youth organizations,
or wherever they congregate." In sum, there was to be no area of life-home,
workplace, gym, ballpark-into which state- sponsored propaganda on "reproductive
rights and reproductive health" did not intrude.
Those of us who had thought that this approach to public policy had
been consigned to the trash heap of history in 1989 had evidently been
mistaken.
III
Given their success at Prep-Com III, the smugness and even arrogance
displayed by the UN and Clinton Administration planners of the Cairo conference
was, if not exactly admirable, quite understandable. They seemed to have
perfected a modus operandi that would enable them to steamroller Cairo
in the same way (an expectation that was doubtless further enhanced by
the fact that more than sixty representatives of International Planned
Parenthood would be coming to Cairo as official delegates from many countries).
Not only would Cairo "go beyond Mexico City"; it would adopt
the radicals' lifestyle agenda without too much fuss and bother. Critics
like the Holy See could easily be brushed aside, as they had been in New
York.
Yet even before the Cairo conference convened on Labor Day 1994, some
cracks in the coalition that the conference planners were counting on began
to show. In the United States-and most especially in the higher altitudes
of the Clinton Administration-it is simply assumed that the "empowerment
of women," abortion-on-demand, the libertine mores of the sexual revolution,
and government propaganda (even coercion) on family planning go hand-in-glove.
However, that is not necessarily the way things work in other parts of
the world, or even, for that matter, among the truly radical radicals in
the West. Thus, in the wake of Prep-Com III, certain feminist organizations,
of a far more belligerent kidney than, say, the National Organization for
Women, began planning mock trials, to take place in Cairo, of the World
Bank, International Planned Parenthood, and the UNFPA, charging them with
oppressing women through coercive governmental birth control programs.
As it was to turn out, the feminist sans-culotterie could not win; but
they were harbingers of an unanticipated irony in the outcome of the conference.
In any case, the most consequential thing that the planners of the
Cairo conference had failed to take into account was the moral power of
Pope John Paul II. That the Cairo conference did not adopt, but in fact
rejected, key aspects of its planners' agenda was the result of a variety
of factors: nervousness in Latin America, resistance from Islamic societies,
and resentment in certain African countries of what they saw as Western
cultural imperialism. But the sine qua non of the defeat suffered by the
international advocates of the sexual revolution was the public campaign
of opposition to the Cairo draft document mounted throughout the summer
of 1994 by John Paul II.
This was not a voluble campaign; in its public (as distinguished from
private, i.e., diplomatic) dimension, it consisted of a series of twelve
ten-minute reflections that the Pope offered at his public audiences during
June, July, and August 1994. But by identifying the fundamental ethical
errors of the draft document's approach, and by defining a compelling moral
alternative to UN-sponsored libertinism, John Paul II set in motion a resistance
movement with considerable potency.
In these reflections, the Pope emphasized that the right to life is
the basic human right, "written in human nature," and the foundation
of any meaningful scheme of "human rights"; spoke of the family
as the "primary cell" of society and as a "natural institution"
with rights that any just state must respect; defined marriage "as
a stable union of a man and a woman who are committed to the reciprocal
gift of self and open to creating new life, [which] is not only a Christian
value, but an original value of creation"; defended the equal human
dignity of women, insisted that women must not be reduced to being objects
of male pleasure, and argued that "perfection for woman is not to
be like man, making herself masculine to the point of losing her specific
qualities as a woman"; noted that sexuality has a "language of
its own at the service of love and cannot be lived at the purely instinctual
level"; argued that stable marriages were essential for the welfare
of children; pointed out that the Church does not support an "ideology
of fertility at all costs," but rather proposes a marital ethic in
which the decision "whether or not to have a child" is not "motivated
by selfishness or carelessness, but by a prudent, conscious generosity
that weighs the possibilities and circumstances, and especially gives priority
to the welfare of the unborn child"; rejected coercive or "authoritarian"
family planning programs as a violation of the married couple's basic human
rights and argued that the foundations of justice in a state are undermined
when it does not recognize the unborn child's moral claim to protection;
declared that discrimination against women in "workplace, culture,
and politics" must be eliminated in the name of an "authentic
emancipation" that does not "deprive woman herself of what is
primarily or exclusively hers"; and argued that radical individualism
is inhuman, as is a "sexuality apart from ethical references."
Throughout the summer of 1994, Undersecretary Wirth continued to insist
that "we have no fight with the Vatican." Nonetheless, an argument
of considerable amperage had clearly been engaged. In the wake of the confrontation
with the Holy See's delegation at Prep-Com III, Wirth himself began a tour
of the American hierarchy, focusing on the resident U.S. cardinals. It
would not be unrealistic to suggest that in addition to explaining the
Administration's position, the Undersecretary was searching for a weak
link in the chain of American Catholic episcopal support for John Paul
II and the Holy See. He did not find it. Instead, a letter to President
Clinton from the then six resident U.S. cardinals (Hickey of Washington,
Bernardin of Chicago, Law of Boston, O'Connor of New York, Bevilacqua of
Philadelphia, Mahony of Los Angeles), joined as a co-signatory by the president
of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), Archbishop William
H. Keeler of Baltimore, was hand- delivered to the White House. The letter
expressed the prelates' grave concern over "your Administration's
promotion of abortion, contraception, sterilization, and the redefinition
of the family" and urged the President to reverse the Administration's
"destructive" agenda for Cairo. In addition, the NCCB unanimously
adopted a statement in which the bishops, as "religious leaders and
as U.S. citizens," declared themselves "outraged that our government
is leading the effort to foster global acceptance of abortion." And
lest it be thought that worries over Cairo were exclusively Catholic, it
should be noted that eleven evangelical leaders, including Charles Colson,
James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, Billy Melvin, and Bill Bright, cosigned
a letter of their own urging the President "not to make the United
States an exporter of violence and death."
By the end of the summer, the Pope's decisive clarification of the
moral issues at stake in Cairo had not only put the impending conference
on the front pages of the prestige press, it had also had a powerful political
effect. Undersecretary Wirth, by now a somewhat improbable figure, continued
to plead, against all the evidence, that the administration had "no
fight with the Vatican." But his superiors evidently disagreed, and
were even more evidently worried; for on August 25, Vice President Al Gore,
who was to lead the U.S. delegation in the early days of the Cairo conference,
gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington in which he stated
that "the U.S. has not sought, does not seek, and will not seek to
establish any international right to abortion." Any attempt to suggest
otherwise was a "red herring." Yet, as the Holy See's press spokesman,
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, pointed out at a press conference in Rome a few
days later, Gore's statement did not square with the draft document, whose
definition of "reproductive health care" as including "pregnancy
termination" had been a U.S. initiative. (Navarro-Valls, in what was
perhaps an exercise of charity, did not point out that Gore's Press Club
speech was also inconsistent with the Christopher cable of March 16, with
the Administration's domestic policy, and with its foreign aid programs.)
There is some reason to believe that the Vice President was misinformed,
rather than deliberately disingenuous, on these matters. And no doubt the
Vice President was genuinely concerned about charges of administration
anti-Catholicism, reignited when a Reuters story of August 19 quoted Faith
Mitchell, the State Department's population coordinator, as blaming Vatican
disagreement with the Cairo draft document on "the fact that the conference
is really calling for a new role for women, calling for girls' education
and improving the status of women."* But whatever else it clarified
or obscured, the Gore/Navarro- Valls exchange made it unmistakably clear
that a great battle loomed in Cairo, where the "private sector advisers"
to the U.S. delegation included Pamela Maraldo, president of Planned Parenthood
of America and, in what the Administration may inexplicably have thought
was a concession to religious concerns, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general
secretary of the National Council of Churches.
Perhaps the less ideological and more politically astute members of
the U.S. delegation hoped that the moral issues could somehow be finessed.
But on the very first day of the conference, any such hopes were dashed:
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan-unmistakably a woman, unmistakably
Harvard-educated, and unmistakably a major political figure-took to the
rostrum, defended the "sanctity of life" on religious grounds,
and condemned the Cairo draft document for trying to "impose adultery,
sex education . . . and abortion" on all countries. Predictably, the
media gave more attention to distaff Norwegian prime minister Brundtland's
defense of "choice" as the essence of the moral issue of abortion.
But Bhutto's impassioned rejection of abortion-on- demand, featured on
page one of both the New York Times and the Washington Post and accompanied
by pictures of the Pakistani and Norwegian leaders, easily won the battle
of feminist iconography-and should have rebutted, once and for all, the
charge that the Vatican was holding up consensus on the Cairo document
for narrow sectarian reasons.
The opening day statements were followed by five days of negotiating
impasse on the document's abortion language, its discussion of the family,
and its approach to adolescent sexuality. During that first week, anti-Catholic
sentiment and decidedly undiplomatic criticism of the Holy See were freely
vented by NGO activists and official delegates alike. Nicolaas Biegman,
the Dutch conference vice chairman, complained after four days that "all
we read [about] is abortion, abortion, abortion. I deeply regret it. I
think it's a pity." Columbia University's Allan Rosenfield, who represented
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, opined that "the
Catholic women of the world do not buy into statements from the elderly
celibate clergy." Another expert in ecclesiology, Alexander Sanger,
president of Planned Parenthood of New York City, told the New York
Times that "there are two churches, one where the hierarchy talks
to the presidents of countries, and then there's the church of the people.
The people are picking and choosing what parts of Catholicism they want
to carry over to their personal lives." Colombia's Miguel Trias, who
heads a government-sponsored family planning organization, fretted that
"these Latin American countries are trying to make the Vatican happy.
But in 2,000 years the Vatican has never been happy."
Nor was this kind of unpleasantness limited to press conferences. Gail
Quinn, a member of the Holy See delegation and executive director of the
U.S. bishops' Pro-Life Secretariat, was booed and hissed in a formal session
of the conference when she rose to explain the Vatican's objections to
some abortion language in the proposed final report; the delegate from
Benin had to admonish the chair, the ubiquitous Dr. Sai, that free speech
was supposed to be sacrosanct in UN deliberations. Later, while walking
past two American representatives in a "delegates- only" area
of the conference Center, Quinn heard one of the Americans say to another,
in a deliberately audible stage whisper, "There goes that bitch."
All of which should have suggested, at least to the knowledgeable,
that the Holy See's delegation was having a considerable impact at Cairo.
As, indeed, it was. For contrary to reports in the Times and elsewhere
that the Holy See had suffered a significant setback, by the end of the
first week of the Cairo conference, the Vatican had in fact achieved a
great deal. The final report now stated, unambiguously, that "in no
case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning."
The notion of enshrining abortion-on-demand as an internationally recognized
basic human right-the centerpiece of the Wirth approach to Cairo-had been
abandoned by its proponents, who tacitly conceded that there was no international
consensus supporting the claim. The rights and responsibilities of parents
in respect of their teenage children had been reaffirmed, and the worst
of the euphemistic language about the structure of the family had been
changed, so that the Cairo document could not credibly be appealed to on
behalf of "gay marriage" and other innovations.
The last major sticking point involved the "safety" of abortions-an
important question for the Holy See, which believes that no abortion can
be "safe" since, by definition, it results in the death of an
innocent human being. The language in dispute stated that "in circumstances
where abortion is legal, such abortion should be safe." At the level
of moral principle, this was clearly unacceptable to the Vatican, being
as it was the equivalent of saying that "in circumstances where female
circumcision is legal, it should be performed with novocaine." The
language was finally altered to read, "in circumstances where abortion
is not against the law, such abortion should be safe"-on the surface
a minor change, but one that holds out the prospect of legal reform and
that does not concede the rectitude of permissive abortion laws.
The New York Times insisted on reporting these debates as a
matter of "the Vatican and its few remaining allies" obstructing
the course of human progress. But there were other dynamics at work at
Cairo, as at Budapest and Mexico City, and it seemed possible that they
could frustrate the more ambitious plans of both population controllers
and lifestyle radicals in the future. The controllers' agenda (one of whose
historic roots is, frankly, a set of eugenic phobias about "those
kind of people") continues to cause serious concern in Latin America,
Africa, and Asia, where political leaders understand that it is their populations,
not that of, say, Norway, which are to be brought "under control."
The resistance of Islamic, Latin American, and some African countries to
the libertinism enshrined in the Cairo draft document was also of significance
for the future. One need not admire many aspects of life in those societies
to applaud their recognition that the sexual revolution's promises of a
permissive cornucopia (in Zbigniew Brzezinski's telling phrase) are a snare
and a delusion. And, as that recognition becomes increasingly widespread
in an America struggling with unprecedented levels of illegitimacy, welfare
dependency, and spousal and child abuse, we may also see a dramatic change
in our domestic politics. For as the Clinton Administration's defeat at
Cairo graphically illustrates, you cannot have it both ways: you cannot
strengthen the family and the serious moral commitments necessary to sustain
the family by treating the community of father, mother, and children as
one option in a limitless menu of "lifestyle alternatives."
Over the long haul, though, the most significant development at the
Cairo conference may have been that of a shift in controlling paradigms:
from "population control" to "the empowerment of women."
As one Indonesian delegate put it toward the end of the meeting, "We
have stopped calling women the receptors of contraceptives. We now call
them agents of change." Americans long familiar with the alliance
between feminism and libertinism may instinctively regard this shift, with
reason, as simply an amplification of the moral crisis of modernity. But
at Cairo there were interesting suggestions that, in different cultural
and historical contexts, the issue of "empowerment" may not cut
the way it does in Western Europe and in some parts of the United States.
Benazir Bhutto's speech was one example of that intriguing possibility.
For Bhutto's very presence at Cairo, coupled with the content of her remarks,
posed a sharp question: why should the "empowerment of women"
be necessarily linked to the codification in international law (and national
statutes) of the sexual revolution? Who says "A" does not necessarily
have to say "B"-at least in non-Western cultures and traditional
societies. (Indeed, it is worth remembering that American and Western European
pro-life feminists, the vast majority of whom are deeply committed Christians,
have resolutely declined to say "B.") Perhaps the question can
be pressed even further, though: in the developing world, why shouldn't
"the empowerment of women"-meaning that women should be educated,
healthy, and no longer treated as property for purposes of marriage-serve
to strengthen the roles of women as wives, mothers, and primary educators
of their children? Might "the empowerment of women," in cultures
whose women would regard Bella Abzug and Pamela Maraldo as something like
aliens from Alpha Centauri, lead to a revitalization of the traditional
family and a reaffirmation of the distinctively maternal power of women?
Joan Dunlop, president of the International Women's Health Coalition,
found it "really extraordinary that in an international UN forum we
are talking about sexual and reproductive health and the empowerment of
women. These are things that many people of different cultures can understand."
Indeed. But the question is, how? The travail of the conference translators
at Cairo suggests the volatility of this "empowerment" language
(and the rest of the armamentarium of fem-speak) and the difficulty of
predicting precisely how it will shape lives in radically different societies
and cultures.
French translators had to resuscitate a nineteenth-century term (sante
genesique) in the effort to render "reproductive health" in their
language. "Family leave" had almost everybody but the Americans
stumped; the Arabic translation refers to parents leaving each other after
a birth, while the Russian translation spoke of the entire family taking
a vacation together. The Chinese thought "sexual exploitation"
was an easy one, for they could rely on Chairman Mao's critique of capitalists.
(They could also have used his doctor's memoirs, in which the chairman
is remembered as an unregenerate sexual predator who ingested ground elks'
horns as an antidote to impotence.) But the Arabs were caught between American
buzz words and their own religious sensibilities. "Sexually active
unmarried individuals"-who are committing criminal acts under Islamic
law-thus became "sexually active as-yet-to-be married individuals."
The Russians couldn't figure out how to translate "unwanted pregnancies"
so that the phrase did not denote "undesirable pregnancies";
and that was relatively mild, compared to the Russian translation of "reproductive
health," which comes out as "health that reproduces itself again
and again" (the Arabic cuts even closer to the bone of the abortion
issue, as "reproductive health" becomes "health concerning
the begetting of children").
One veteran population activist, Jason Finkle of the University of
Michigan, worried that "all kinds of things have now been packed into
the trunk of population: women's and children's health, female literacy,
women's labor rights. I'm fearful that we've gotten away from the focus
on population size and growth." It does not seem, after Cairo, an
entirely unreasonable expectation. But some will regard this as something
less to be feared than to be-very cautiously-celebrated.
IV
Some things that ought to have happened at Cairo didn't. There was no
concerted challenge to the ideologically charged concept of "overpopulation,"
although the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, Julian Simon, Karl Zinsmeister,
and others has made clear that the term itself has no credible scientific
meaning. This intellectual failure, combined with the clash of moral visions
at Cairo, produced a somewhat schizoid final document, which endorses voluntary
measures of population control but then sets population targets whose achievement
would seem to require coercive governmental intervention in family planning.
The resolution of that tension will, over the next decade, tell us much
about the future of population policy (and politics) at both the international
and national levels.
The conference also failed to confront the UN's continuing fixation
on Third World development as essentially a matter of massive resource
transfers from the developed to the developing world. The Holy See did
heroic work at Cairo, and in the months between Prep-Com III and the September
conference. But it would have added even more to the debate had its representatives
taken up the question of governmental criminality and its relationship
to the despoilation of the Third World; materials for such a challenge
were ready to hand in the 1987 encyclical of John Paul II, Solicitudo Rei
Socialis, in which the Pope had urged developing nations to "reform
certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions,
in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial, and authoritarian governments
with democratic and participatory ones." The Holy See might also have
taken a leaf from John Paul's 1991 social encyclical Centesimus Annus and
boldly urged the view that human beings are the basic resource for development,
because the source of wealth in the modern world is human creativity.
At the grassroots level, it will be a while before the paradigm shift
from "population control" to "empowerment of women"
takes effect. Meanwhile, huge amounts of money will continue to be poured
into family planning programs, many of which are either subtly or overtly
coercive. Remedial action on this front will require extreme vigilance
over foreign aid budgets, and careful attention will have to be paid to
the Clinton Administration as it tries to square its adherence to an international
agreement that flatly rejects abortion as a means of family planning with
its commitment to huge increases in U.S. aid funding to organizations that
actively promote precisely that evil.
So the Battle of Cairo will continue, in other venues. And it will
remain, at bottom, a moral struggle: about the dignity and value of human
beings, about the rights and responsibilities of women and men, about the
relationship between marriage, sexuality, and the rearing of children.
Thanks to John Paul II's refusal to concede the Holy See's irrelevance
in accordance with the prepared media script, the unavoidable moral core
of the population argument was forced onto center stage at Cairo. And there
it became clear, to those with eyes to see, that the mores of Hollywood,
Manhattan's Upper West Side, and Copenhagen are not universally shared,
admired, or sought.
That, in itself, was no mean accomplishment. And it might, just might,
presage a more morally and empirically serious population and development
debate in the future.
*In the same Reuters report in which Ms.
Mitchell suggested that the Church wanted to deny women an education, State
Department spokesman Mike McCurry warned the Vatican against negotiating
with Iran. A week later, in Cairo, American delegates were seen openly
negotiating compromise language on abortion and "reproductive rights"
with Iranian delegates.
George Weigel, a member of the Editorial
Board of First Things, is President of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C.
