Head of U.S. ICPD delegation describes goals
U.S. Counselor Timothy Wirth, speaking at the Third PrepCom, linked the goals of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development to other U.N.-sponsored conferences on sustainable development, human rights, social development and women’s issues. However, he reversed the order of his ‘litany’ when speaking of policy. “What I would like to emphasize today,” said Wirth, “is the fact that advancing the roles and rights of women is a critical common thread that must be woven through the recommendations and implementation of our goals from Rio, Vienna, Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing.”
“Sustainable development, he added, “cannot be realized without the full engagement and complete empowerment of women .… We can emerge from Cairo with a new recognition that women must be the primary agents for, and beneficiaries of a comprehensive effort to realize sustainable development.” Wirth called for “the adaptation of the world’s population and development programs faced by adolescent girls .… We know that this strategy will help early pregnancy and slow population momentum, but we can only begin to appreciate the genius that would be unleashed if young women are vested with societal expectations beyond marriage and child-bearing” (“Wirth spells out U.S. commitment to Cairo,” The Earth Times, 4 April 1994, emphasis added).
Islamic leaders object to U.N. ICPD document
Islamic leaders from the Azhar, the most prestigious institution of Islamic learning in the world, have objected to the resolutions proposed by the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The Azhar accuses the U.N. document of condoning “extramarital sex and easy abortion.”
The Islamic Studies Centre also noted that the document undermines parental authority and encourages prostitution. The language therefore requires alterations which would bring it into conformity with Islamic principles. The Centre urged Moslems attending the Cairo conference to record their reservations.
The Azhar statement detailed concerns related to the defense of “sexual relations which arise between different sexes outside legal marriage, which destroys the values to which all revealed religion aspires.” Further concerns were expressed in relation to a clause which advocates privacy and confidentiality for adolescents receiving sexual health care and information. This specifically contradicts Islamic understandings of parental authority and incites adolescents to follow their own inclinations.
The Azhar strongly objected to “ambiguous expressions, abstract terms and innovative jargon which abound in it suggest that it aims to adopt the opposite of the basic precepts which Islam has laid down.”
Concern about the abortion issue was raised in relation to passages which might legitimate abortion in circumstances other than saving the life of the mother.
Expressions and terminology within the document “must be changed to correct and strengthen the wording.” The Centre called “on the participating states to reword the draft so that it does not contain anything in opposition to Islamic law” (Jonathan Wright, “Islamic authority objects .…,” RTw, 11 August 1994).
‘Resist and reject’ pressure, say U.S. Congressman
Seventy members of the U.S. House of Representatives were signatories to a letter which urged foreign beads of state to resist and reject pressure from the Clinton Administration to sanction abortion-on-demand in their respective countries.
“Abortion has already had a devastating impact in the United States, and we must therefore resist the Clinton Administration’s attempt to export this grisly procedure throughout the world,” according to Rep. Christopher Smith (R-ND, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Unrestricted abortion has resulted in a cheapening of human life in the U.S., and in trying to force other countries to walk down this path; the Clinton Administration is guilty of the worst sort of cultural imperialism,” he concluded.
Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL.), another signatory to the letter, noted: “There are millions of citizens, myself included, who view abortion as nothing more than state-sanctioned, institutionalized violence against unborn children .… It is tragic enough that abortion is so commonplace in our country, but to promote this violence and export it to other nations is unconscionable,” the Congressman stated. The letter was forwarded to heads of state and other diplomatic officials in nearly 100 countries.
On the other hand, a recent U.S. State Department cable urged U.S. personnel to lobby foreign diplomats to accept “stronger language on the importance of access to abortion services…” The cable also described abortion as a “fundamental right” (Congressional Press release; Department of State, outgoing telegram).
Abortion needed for fertility control, says abortion doctor
Dr. Warren Hern, a physician who specializes in late-term abortions, was interviewed by The Earth Times. He was quoted as saying: “Abortion, as well as other forms of fertility control, is an essential component of women’s health in the 20th century. Without the 55 million abortions performed each year around the world, the world population would be growing at up to 2.4 percent per year. [The present world Population growth rate is 1.5, World Population Profile 1994, U.S. Dept of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 5.] In order to stop population growth, safe abortion must be widely available to women because at least 250,000 women die needlessly from illegal or improperly performed abortions. If a higher proportion of pregnancies could be prevented among those who wish to do so, and if a higher proportion of women seeking abortion for unwanted pregnancy were able to do so safely, the growth rates could be more easily brought to lower levels” (Dr. Warren M. Hern, American Public Health Association, The Earth Times, 11 April 1994).
The UNDP analysis
Mahbub ul Haq of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) also offered an inclusive approach to population control. “Population growth is a developmental issue,” he said, “not a clinical problem.” The process of development changes “the dynamics of demographic transition.” The present industrial world “did not require mass distribution of condoms in their period of most rapid population growth,” according to ul Haq. It was the “[r]apidly rising development level, particularly rising education and health standards, [which] changed their social attitudes and did the job of slowing down their population growth rates.”
Today however, “[f]amily planning programs must be regarded as an integral part of the new models of sustainable human development. Divorced from such development models, and pursued as condom-distribution programs with a single-minded zeal to meet ‘unmet demand,’ they will fail.…”
“In the global life boat, it is not just numbers but their weight that counts. In global terms…existing resource consumption patterns [in the rich countries is] the real problem, not population increase in the poor countries.… Halving the population growth rate in the US would have relieved more global environmental pressure during the last three decades than halving India’s population growth rate” (“We cannot slip a condom on global poverty,” The Earth Times, 20 April 1994, vol. 6, no. 29, l).
The ‘Counselor’ cometh
The background of Timothy Wirth, the Clinton Administration’s new “Global Counselor” was examined by The Earth Times — and, here’s the scoop!
Timothy Wirth was a congressman for 12 years and a senator for six years until 1993 when he chose to sit out the senatorial campaign as a ‘gentleman-in-waiting’ for the Clinton Administration. He was a founding member of Denver Head Start; board member of Denver Planned Parenthood; member of the Colorado Black Chamber of Commerce; and on the advisory board for the Colorado Hispanic Agenda. In the Senate, he was assigned to the Armed Services Committee, Budgeting and Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and Energy and Natural Resources. He is, as Global Counselor, a member of the U.N.’s Council on Sustainable Development. He was a private in the United States Army and co-chairman of the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign.
Nobody can accuse Wirth of being humble. “I have a very large portfolio at the State Department,” he allows. His encyclopedic ‘portfolio’ includes population, refugees, ocean, environment, science, democracy, human rights, labor, narcotics, terrorism and crime. “I’m Undersecretary for Global Affairs,” says Wirth, “but I’m called a counselor.” (“They call him ‘Counselor,’” The Earth Times, 4 April 1994, vol. 6, no. 17, 4).
Welcome to Cairo!
Aziza Hussein is chair of Egypt’s NGO Steering Committee, a role in which she oversees the role of Egyptian nongovernmental organizations as host at the NGO Forum of September‘s International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).
She is a graduate of American University in the United States; and has been involved with Cairo’s first day care center and first family planning center. She was a member of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women and president of International Planned Parenthood Federation from 1978 to 1983. For Egyptian NGOs, she said, the Population and Development Conference is helping to “unfold our potential.” NGOs in Egypt existed before the turn of the century, according to Hussein, and blossomed in the 1920s with the organization of the Feminist Union, which she described as “an offshoot of the independence movement.” The encouragement of family planning in Egypt began in 1963 with a campaign by the Cairo Women’s Club, she said (Ibid., “Wisdom of the grassroots,” 15).
In the U.N. ‘counting-house’
U.N. Population Division members have been counting, counting, counting — “men, women, children of all ages; motor vehicles, houses, the unborn, the dead, and trends” — for 47 years. The division studies “mortality, fertility, internal and international migration, urbanization and other demographic phenomena and prepares U.N. estimates and projections.” If you’ve been wondering whom to blame for the “guesstimates dignified by decimal points” described by economist Nick Eberstadt, then ‘belly up to the bar boys,’ you’ve found your way home!
Director Joseph Chamie, in the division for almost 14 years, is responsible for “raking in numbers from all over the world, deciding their validity, interpreting and evaluating them, and presenting the figures to politicians, academicians.” “You have to examine these figures along many dimensions,” says Chamie.
Within the pressure cooker of the ICPD, the job breakdowns are as follows: Chamie is Deputy Secretary General of the ICPD; Dr. Nafis Sadik of the UN Population Fund is the Secretary General; Jyoti Shankar Singh is Executive Coordinator; and German Bravo-Casas is the Deputy Executive Coordinator. Dr. Sadik and Singh are with the Population Fund, Chamie and Bravo, with the Population Division. Bravo, a Colombian, is the Co-Coordinator of World Population Conference Implementation. He says proudly, “Population is one of the fields where the UN has been successful” (“Statistics, in population, are living things,” The Earth Times, 22 April 1994, vol. 6, no. 31, 7).
A gender essay
“Members of a recent Ghanaian women’s delegation to Britain to raise money for medical equipment, privately expressed opposition to population control policies, but felt unable to voice their concerns, for fear that their request for funds would be turned down. Their dilemma illustrates the pressures for birth control measures…coming from Western governments and international financial institutions .…
“Incentives and disincentives, like the 1984 World Bank proposal that female Tanzanian civil servants be allowed paid maternity leave only once in three years, are less about provision of care to individuals than about shaping policy to achieve a national goal — fewer children .… That also partly explains why, though freedom of choice for women is the cry of the family planning enthusiasts, freedom is restricted both by what is made available and by pressure from officials and clinical personnel.
“Government officials, for example, prefer permanent methods because they need no follow-up or monitoring. So it is no coincidence that female sterilization is the most common modern method of contraception in the world today. Once it has been done, officials can cross the woman off their list: another target hit. No dropout rate, no further expenditure required on motivation or equipment; the perfect bureaucratic device .…
“In Ghana, recently, a newly-qualified doctor at the prestigious Korle Bu Teaching Hospital told me that he had sterilized several women after advising them that it was in their best interests. The doctor said the women already had more than five children, and he ‘felt they couldn’t cope with another child’.…
“In 1988, abortion was virtually unthinkable as an official family planning practice in Nigeria. As recently as 1990, the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria was forced to defend itself against allegations that it promoted the sale and use of ‘contraceptives’ that were abortifacient in nature. A year later — and two months after approval of a $78 million World Bank population loan — the government announced proposals for allowing abortion under certain conditions .…
“For Dr. Nafis Sadiq, head of the U.N. Population Fund, the heart of the proposals to be discussed at the forthcoming UN Conference on Population and Development, of which she is secretary-general, ‘is the recognition that the low status of women is a root cause of inadequate reproductive health care.’ Such comments suggest that population control activists have ridden into Third World countries on the back of feminist rhetoric (Barbara Akapo, “When family planning meets population control,” Gender Review, June 1994, 8–9).
Vatican launches another attack on ICPD
Pope John Paul II, directly denounced the upcoming U.N. population conference, insisting that political leaders are overstepping ethical bounds by advocating abortion and artificial contraception.
This advocacy seeks to deprive couples of the right to determine the size of their families, the Pope says. He contends the U.N. conference addresses the issue of population growth as a political and economic problem but ignores ethical and religious points of view. “Political ethics…puts precise limits on the intervention of the state and the international community,” said the Pope. “To deprive couples of their primary responsibility is unjust .… Here is one of the main differences between the church and the emerging statements from governments,” he added (AP, Castle Gondolpho, Italy, 24 July).
No AIDS vaccine before the end of the century
Scientists in America and Europe report that preliminary vaccines for AIDS are powerless to raise antibodies that will block the naturally occurring strains of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). “We seemed to be doing so well in developing vaccines, but this has rocked us,” said Marc Girard, head of France’s AIDS vaccine research program. “It has put us back years,” he said.
The various vaccine teams approached the problem by removing pieces of one of the virus’s genes. These were inserted into microbes, which were then grown in vats. Injected into human volunteers, these inert viruses were expected to trigger the manufacture of antibodies .… But when researchers used “wild” strains of HIV, found in the blood of AIDS patients, they discovered that the vaccines failed to neutralize the viruses.
Scientists have created a product that can only offer protection against laboratory strains of HIV and is useless at blocking virus strains actually occurring in real life (“AIDS scientists suffer setback,” The Washington Times, 12 April 1994, A3).
No hot time in the old town tonight!
“Threats of a temperature rise of a couple of degrees centigrade is based “entirely on rather complicated calculations from a rather simple theory, namely that a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere from the burning of oil, gas, and coal will, like a blanket, retain more of the earth’s heat, resulting in a warmer climate,” according to climatologist Fred Singer. “The global temperature record of the last 100 years does show a small increase, about 0.5 degrees C (0.9 degree Fahrenheit), but that is less than half of what is predicted .… [further] the increase occurred before 1940, well before there was a substantial build-up of CO2.”
The official global record, supplied by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “shows maximum temperatures in the 1980s and still rising ominously.” In contrast, “the published analysis of the U.S. temperature record by climatologist Thomas Karl and colleagues at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows a maximum around 1940, followed by a decrease.”
A new analysis by “Wisconsin climatologist Reid Bryson, published in the winter 1993 issue of Environmental Conservation,” questions the IPCC conclusions. In fact, Bryson “combined a predominantly land-station record with what he considers to be the least biased record of the large array of ships’ observations. His result also shows a global temperature maximum around 1940, confirming Karl, and contradicting the IPCC.”
“The highest quality data are now coming from a satellite-borne microwave radiometer, which measures the temperature of the lowest layer of the atmosphere as it orbits the globe from pole to pole .… While the mathematical models predict a ‘best’ temperature rise of 0.3 degrees (0.5 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, the satellite data admit, at most, one-fifth of that. If extrapolated to the next century, the feared global warming may not even be detectable above the ‘noise’ of natural climate fluctuations. But Singer points out: “[T]he fact that science now offers scant support to the global warming scare has not slowed the politicians, nor forced a revision of the Climate Treaty” (Fred Singer, “Cool down on global warming,” The Earth Times, 31 May–2 June 1994, vol. 7, no. 3, 23).
