The issues at the up-conting United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) go far beyond those of contraceptives, abortion, population control or even reproductive health. Our report on PrepCom ID (see page 3) shows clearly that at stake is nothing less than women’s rights and the quality of women’s Lives. The most fundamental
aspect of women’s struggles – our right to bodily integrity – is being undennined by a small group of states directed by the Vatican, and the majority of governments appear to offer little resistance to this tyranny of the minority.
In this situation the women’s movement acted as a powerful force – the only one to challenge the hegemony of the Vatican at the PrepCom and beyond. Why is it that women’s interests have become the target of these fundamentalist forces? Over the past 10 years the women’s movement has emerged as arguably the most significant movement to speak out on issues of social and economic justice. It is the women’s movement that has challenged the hegemony of institutions like the church which claim to speak for human rights and justice, while taking positions that deny these basic rights to the majority of the world’s population. And, it is a constituency of women’s organizations that has developed the new framework on population and development through an exhaustive and careful process of research and consultation.
The Vatican and its supporters have sought to portray the new approach to population as individualistic, dangerous, unethical and focussed on the single issue of abortion (see page 5). But the fact is that the new framework is far more comprehensive, inclusive, holistic and ethical than the previous one, which merely focussed on family planning and fertiLity control.
The new framework of ‘rights, health and empowerment’, speaks to the indivisibiJity of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights and the link between these and women’s access to economic resources, livelihood and social services. It identifies abortion as a public health issue and recommends comprehensive reproductive health services including counselling, screening and prevention of sexuality transmitted diseases and reproductive tract infections, and anti- and postnatal care. It also calls for increased funding to programmes aimed at reducing the health hazards associated with clandestine abortion, and for research and accountability mechanisms to ensure that women’s health and lives are not placed in jeopardy by programmes which are insensitive to their needs.
When the draft Plan of Action was debated at PrepCom III, almost all references to the new framework were bracketed and these are the sections of text that the Vatican and its supporters are seeking to have removed under lhe guise that their foclusion makes the document ‘unethical’. But, as the Chairperson of PrepCom,m pointed out, the whole document is about ethics!
Indeed, the Round Table on Ethics sponsored by the Columbia University Department of International Law (New York, March 1994), and attended by a number of feminists, was one of the highlights of the several infonnal consultations initiated by the UN Secretariat and, what of the Vatican’s claim that the new approach has been imposed by an imperialist feminist ideology from the North? In truth, it is thanks largely to the efforts of women of the South and women of colour of the North, that feminism in the 1990s stands not for individualism but for relationships, not for selfishness but for solidarity. The feminism reflected in the draft document is about a deep concern for the lives and wellbeing of people, especially ‘the poorest of the poor, the most powerless of the powerless’. It is a feminism which finds its roots not in New York or Toronto, London or Paris, but in the experiences of the most marginalized sectors of our societies – in the slums of Calcutta and the barrios of Brazil, in the maquiladoras of Mexico, in the brothels of Bangkok, and in the toxic dumps of Manila – and in women’s research centres and organizations throughout the South.
DAWN has contributed significantly to the analysis which has led to the emergence of this new framework (see pages 6, 7 & 11). This analysis examines rtproductive rights and health, population and development in a more structural, more holistic and more political way. It emphasizes the link between increasing poverty, macro-economic policies of structural
adjustment, decreasing public investment in social services and the deterioration in health, education, welfare and human wellbeing everywhere.
Women must continue to stand united, as they were at PrepCom Ill, to resist these attempts to send them back into the kitchens – barefoot, iUiterate and pregnant – so that the forces of oppression can continue unchallenged.
We must not be silenced by the name-calling and the slurs to our character.
We must continue to assert our claims as responsible, relational and rational human beings seeking a more just and humane world for ourselves, our children, our families, our communities, our countries, our world.