The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (18 page)

Theodore W. Shultz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who served as an adviser to the awards committee, was appalled, and demanded that his name not be attached to the honor. In a letter to UNFPA head Rafael Salas, he argued that lauding Gandhi and Qian greatly damaged the agency’s cause. “The harm was done by awarding the prize to a public official in China where public policy is responsible for the appallingly high rate of female infanticide and a prize to the head of state of India despite her cruel mandated sterilization,” he wrote.
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He was right. By condoning coercion the UNFPA seemed to prove the most vehement critics of international family planning correct. The charges against the agency would continue to stick decades later, even after it had thoroughly reformed itself, providing a pretext for antiabortion forces in the administration of George W. Bush to strip its funding once again.

M
althusian ideas had been drummed out of the American mainstream from two directions. The world’s population continued its swift growth, but at least in the United States talk of overpopulation was becoming taboo on both the feminist left and the conservative right. The old moderate establishment that led centrists of both parties to support family planning out of national self-interest had been seriously weakened. What remained were proponents of reproductive rights on one side and champions of religious traditionalism on the other. And, of course, the women all around the world whose health care—and sometimes very lives—were at stake.

The infrastructure the population movement had built still existed, but it would increasingly be run by people who shared Dunlop and Germain’s ideas. The International Women’s Health Coalition, once a radical outsider, would be at the forefront, organizing women around the world in governments and at the grass roots. Within a few decades an international alliance of women would spur massive changes, not just in population programs but in international law and human rights practice. All would begin to affirm the importance of reproductive rights, including, emphatically, abortion rights. There would be a kind of revolution, though the stultifying, banal patois of the development bureaucracy often served to obscure its import.

The next time there was a big UN Population Conference, in Cairo in 1994, members of the international women’s movement would be the ones writing the platform. Adrienne Germain would be on the U.S. government delegation; Sandra Kabir would be part of the team representing Bangladesh. By 2004, Human Rights Watch would add reproductive rights to its portfolio; Amnesty International would follow three years later. Women who had been denied therapeutic abortions would eventually start taking their cases before international bodies, including the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

If the public at large didn’t notice these changes, a number of religious conservatives certainly did. As the global women’s movement fought to make reproductive rights universal, conservatives from around the world joined hands across theological divides in opposition to what seemed the ultimate in aggressive cosmopolitanism. United Nations meetings and conferences would become forums for seemingly obscure but often intense and consequential struggles between universal rights and religious and cultural tradition, between the liberties due each individual and the power of groups—nations, villages, families—to regulate their members.

“My best description of this whole period—which was very exciting, very anxiety provoking—is that I was just making it up as I was going along,” Dunlop said of the early days of the coalition. “Literally making it up. We knew what our values were, but we didn’t have any idea where we were really going in the long run. We just kept holding tight to those values and to those alliances. . . . We didn’t realize going into it that such latent political opposition was lurking in the shadows.”
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CHAPTER 4 :
CAIRO AND BEIJING

The future war is between the religious and the materialists. . . . Collaboration between religious governments in support of outlawing abortion is a fine beginning for the conception of collaboration in other fields.

—Iranian deputy foreign minister Mohammad Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on his 1994 talks with the Vatican
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C
airo was tense as the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development convened in a hall across the street from the scene of President Anwar el-Sadat’s assassination. There were threats from Islamic terrorists and, correspondingly, thousands of extra policemen on the streets. Right-wing Christians too were in an uproar, and outside the meeting, protesters held huge placards showing dismembered fetuses. There had been enormous press attention in the run-up, and over three thousand journalists had registered to cover the event, a watershed that would for the first time enshrine reproductive rights as an international consensus.

On the first day Gro Harlem Brundtland, the prime minister of Norway, took the stage. Eschewing diplomatic politesse, she electrified the room by lambasting the Vatican. Morality, she said, “cannot only be a question of controlling sexuality and protecting unborn life. Morality is also a question of giving individuals the opportunity of choice, of suppressing coercion of all kinds and abolishing the criminalization of individual tragedy. Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers’ suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions, and unwanted children living in misery.” The crowd applauded. She continued, “None of us can disregard that abortions occur, and that where they are illegal, or heavily restricted, the life and health of the woman is often at risk. Decriminalizing abortions should therefore be a minimal response to this reality, and a necessary means of protecting the life and health of women.” Applause turned to cheers.

Vice President Al Gore, hobbling on crutches after a recent operation, followed with a generally conciliatory speech (“[W]hat is truly remarkable about this conference,” he said, “is not only the unprecedented degree of consensus about the nature of the problem, but also the degree of consensus about the nature of the solution.”) After him was Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, who, under pressure from conservatives in her own country, surprised many with a speech staking out a position on the right. “Our document should seek to promote the objective of planned parenthood, of population control,” she said. “This conference must not be viewed by the teeming masses of the world as a universal social charter seeking to impose adultery, abortion, sex education, and other such matters on individuals, societies, and religions which have their own social ethos.” She affirmed the importance of women’s empowerment, but continued, “Regrettably, the conference’s document contains serious flaws in striking at the heart of a great many cultural values, in the North and in the South, in the mosque and in the church.” A few days later Mother Teresa faxed a statement to the conference calling abortion “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world today.”
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At Cairo the culture wars went global as never before. Some of the most powerful people in the world faced off in an existential battle over how women’s lives should be valued. Which is supreme—their rights as individuals or their roles as mothers? When culture and human rights collide, which should prevail, and who gets to decide?

In a way this was a fight over modernity itself, and it created some surprising bedfellows. The conference and all its surrounding drama marked the emergence of an odd but clarifying alliance between conservative Muslims and Christians, who formed a united front against the dread forces of feminism, secularism, and liberalism. This international ecumenical right endures to this day, continuing to influence global policy on women’s issues.

At bottom, the alliance was based on a shared rejection of women’s autonomy, and of secular values more broadly, at a time when the spread of such values appeared inexorable. In the 1990s, Westerners—especially Western elites—still envisioned a world where religious authority would become increasingly private and irrelevant to public affairs. In a way, the global regime of human rights was trying to move into the role the great world religions once occupied.

It was a time of giant, news-making conferences—among them the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, Cairo in 1994, and, a year later, the Beijing Women’s Summit—that took place in an atmosphere of real optimism about globalization. The knitting together of the world’s markets and the hybridization of its cultures seemed to make Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a “global village” an imminent reality. Globalization’s critics, be they economic leftists or religious conservatives, were marginalized in mainstream political discussion. Conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama became a star with his book
The End of History and the Last Man,
which proclaimed the final triumph of liberal modernity and the emergence of “something like a true global culture, centering around technologically driven economic growth and the capitalist social relations necessary to produce and sustain it.”
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Gathering in world capitals amid flurries of media attention and a cacophony of activists, representatives from all the nations of the planet tried to hash out new norms for human relations to match a newly interconnected world. And at each of these meetings women were, for the first time, at the center of the agenda. “By the early 1990s, the Cold War was over, the Thatcher-Reagan tendency was replaced by kinder, gentler policies, the notion of ‘human security’ was being pushed by the [United Nations Development Program] and the World Bank, and the facts about the failure to close the gender gap were becoming ever clearer,” wrote the historian Paul Kennedy. “The World Bank’s chief economist at that time, Larry Summers, went on record as saying that the single best measure to improve conditions in the developing world would be to increase the access of girls and young women to education—a sweeping claim, but one entirely convincing to those who worked and observed in that field.”
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Women’s rights seemed not only crucial but achievable, if only the energy of the cold war could be redirected toward social progress. This irenic vision, married to a lawyerly faith in the power of language, captured the imagination of newly networked activists worldwide.

Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice and a major presence in the international women’s movement, described the big global conference declarations as “sub-rosa cultural statements about the nature of the universe, the nature of the world. They present a cosmology.” They represented, she said, “the intellectual, conceptual attempt to move the paradigm of human relationships forward.” This, of course, was profoundly threatening to many conservative religious leaders, who believed the basic patterns of human relationships were divinely determined and eternal, and who claimed the power to pronounce on them for themselves.

It’s not surprising that women’s bodies should be the battleground for such a titanic philosophical clash. Sex differences—and sex hierarchies—have always been at the very heart of social organization. As Margaret Mead wrote, “The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.... Upon the contrast in bodily form and function, men have built analogies between sun and moon, night and day, goodness and evil, strength and tenderness, steadfastness and fickleness, endurance and vulnerability.”
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Technological advancement, increased education, urbanization, and secularization almost inevitably undermine dichotomies between men and women, creating increased egalitarianism. Physical strength becomes less economically important, removing one justification for male dominance. Women have fewer children, and make greater investments in them, meaning girls are more likely to go to school and, eventually, into the workforce. As the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart wrote in their 2003 book
Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World
, “Modernization brings systematic,
predictable
changes in gender roles.”
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For those invested in older ways of understanding the world, this process is profoundly disruptive, even terrifying and enraging. Trying to trap women entirely within their wifely, maternal role is one way of fighting against it.

C
onservatives, of course, are not the only ones with antediluvian tendencies. When Dunlop and Germain first started organizing for Cairo, it was partly to head off a far-left feminist faction that had gained prominence at the Earth Summit, a 1992 environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro. The late Bella Abzug, the Bronx-born former congresswoman famous for her progressive pugnacity (and her collection of ostentatious hats), had turned her attention to the international scene in the late 1980s. Her group, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), organized a large feminist presence at the Earth Summit. The women who showed up attacked environmentalists who were concerned about overpopulation as complicit in reproductive coercion. Going further, a number of feminist attendees denounced most modern contraception as dangerous products of the sinister pharmaceutical industry. They regarded U.S.-funded birth control programs as imperialistic at best, genocidal at worst. “Don’t say ‘population control’ around here,” began a
Washington Post
story about the event. “ ‘Control’ bespeaks coercion, forced sterilization and supposed First World fears of a dark-skinned planet. Don’t even say ‘population’ too much—it’s the word that never got credentials at the official Earth Summit.”
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