The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (19 page)

This feminist attack on contraception appeared to take Abzug by surprise. “She didn’t understand the politics of this movement,” said Dunlop. “She couldn’t figure out what was going on—why they were so vigorously opposed [to family planning].”

The radical feminists had plenty of reasons for their suspicions. “At that point in time, there was a serious critique about the way reproductive technology has developed, in terms of not taking into account women’s needs, side effects,” said Sonia Corrêa, a leading Brazilian feminist. “And that critique was not incorrect at that point in time—the quality of the technology was really bad. Hormonal contraceptive methods have improved since then, [partly] because of the critique.”

Nevertheless, when stridently articulated, that critique played right into the hands of religious conservatives. Coming out of Rio, it almost seemed as if radical feminists and the Catholic Church were allied against family planning, an impression that troubled a number of Germain and Dunlop’s allies, women who’d long fought for reproductive rights in their own countries. In the aftermath Dunlop got calls from colleagues in Brazil, Chile, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. “Dissembling on the left was going to make the Right’s job easier,” Dunlop said. “My colleagues were basically saying that to me. . . . They could see it. And so they said, ‘We’d better get ready for Cairo. This is going to get much worse in Cairo.’ ”
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Alarmed, Dunlop and Germain contacted their network of women’s rights activists from all over the world, offering to fly them to London for an immediate meeting. Around twenty came, including Sandra Kabir, Corrêa, and Gita Sen, an Indian economist who had cofounded Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, or DAWN, a group seeking to integrate the economic concerns of women in poor countries into development schemes and international feminist activism. Seeing a need to stake out a position distinct from the population lobby, the ultraleft feminists, and the church, they crafted a statement titled “Women’s Declaration on Population Policies.” A few months later they called a bigger meeting back in Rio de Janeiro. There, in an agonizing nine-hour session chaired by Sen, over two hundred women from around the world agreed on an edited version. Among their demands were a call for the elimination of demographic targets, access to all forms of contraceptives, economic equality and property rights, gender parity in the staffing of reproductive health agencies, and an end to female genital mutilation.

“What we wanted to do was, rather, simply throw the baby out with the bathwater; we wanted to redirect the money,” said Dunlop. “We knew there were huge streams of money going into contraceptive development, and we wanted that money to go in a different direction.” Out of that meeting came the Cairo lobby—a core group of activists who would work both to shape the positions of their own governments and to corral a fractious global feminist movement behind a common agenda.

W
ith Bill Clinton, a stalwart supporter of reproductive rights, in the White House, they had an unprecedented opportunity to shape the American position. The administration invited Dunlop to be part of the official delegation, but she suggested that Germain go instead. Germain could be cold and cutting—“Nobody would feel good after she destroyed every argument within sight,” Dunlop said
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—but no one was better prepared for the agonizing semantic warfare that such conferences entail. “The thing about Adrienne is that she knows more than anybody else,” said Tim Wirth, the former U.S. senator from Colorado who headed the American team. “I always thought that Adrienne was my best tutor. You know, ‘Where’s my lesson plan today?’ I still say that to her when I see her.”

UN summits like Cairo end with a declaration and a detailed plan of action, largely agreed upon in advance and then signed by most world governments. Even before the conference begins, then, there’s a bureaucratic gauntlet of preparatory committees (prepcoms, in UN jargon) in which country delegations wrangle over the wording of the final document. Whenever one of the preliminary meetings took place, the International Women’s Health Coalition raised money to bring their colleagues from other countries to lobby their own delegations, so they had a presence both inside and outside the official negotiations. (By the end of the conference they’d spent a million dollars in donor funds.) “Sometimes we were not allowed in the meeting room,” recalled Kabir. “Then we’d try to get in and then get caught and thrown out. This was great, great fun, I must say.”
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If they had to, the women would corner government representatives in coffee shops, hallways, even in the bathrooms.

From the beginning Germain made sure that the United States joined with the Dutch and the Scandinavians in pushing for a declaration very different from the dry demographic arguments of old. In this she would find a crucial ally in Nafis Sadik, the head of UNFPA and the secretary-general of the Cairo conference.

A
Pakistani doctor who was the first woman to lead the UN population agency, Sadik had strong convictions about women’s rights that had been nurtured in her years working in family planning in her home country, where wives were often treated as chattel. Once, a patient’s husband dismissed Sadik’s concerns about his wife’s health by announcing how much he’d paid for her. “So, I lose my wife,” he said. “Well, if I can’t use her sexually, then what use [is she] to me?”
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Experiences like these taught Sadik that no technocratic approach to reproductive health would mean anything without a guarantee of political rights, and she was determined to tackle potentially incendiary issues like abortion and adolescent sexuality. Her agency was full of people who thought in old-fashioned population control terms, so she went outside it for help in crafting the Cairo declaration.

Wanting to assist her, the Rockefeller Foundation paid for Sharon Camp, a feminist-minded veteran of the population field, to help her write the statement from scratch. Other liberal foundations helped with research and, after three grueling weeks, Sadik had a remarkably progressive document.

“What I did in the plan of action was to write into it my own personal belief, which is that if you provided real reproductive choice to women, you didn’t need to worry, to that same degree, about demographic targets,” said Camp.
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Among other things, the draft called for international action to address unsafe abortion, a major cause of maternal mortality worldwide, and for reproductive health services for adolescents. “It was very much an argument for making abortion safe,” Camp added.
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The language would get watered down in negotiations and rewrites, but the thrust of it would survive.

S
eeing all this, the Vatican was profoundly alarmed. “Now, it seemed as if an alliance was being forged by the world’s only superpower, UN agencies, some European governments, and a well-funded group of powerful non-government organizations in order to enshrine [their] defective notion of freedom in international law, in the name of ‘reproductive rights,’ ” wrote papal hagiographer George Weigel. “This was a battle that had to be joined.”
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The church has always considered abortion wicked, but even within the context of Catholicism, John Paul II was extraordinarily concerned with contraception and fetal life. In his fawning, nearly thousand-page biography of the late pope, Weigel wrote of how seriously the Vatican took Cairo. “This was not another public policy disagreement between the Holy See and a national government,” he wrote. “It was the crucial human rights issue of the 1990s, and it was being played out on a global stage. In every cultural history, a great, defining question emerges.... For John Paul II, the abortion issue was not one issue, but
the
issue for the emerging world culture that would sustain, or corrupt, the free societies of the future.”
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One of his opening salvos was the making of a saint. That April, for the first time in history, Pope John Paul II beatified a married woman with a living husband. Gianna Beretta Molla was an Italian pediatrician and a mother of three when, thirty-nine and pregnant with her fourth child, a tumor was discovered in her uterus. An ardently committed Catholic, Molla refused an operation that would save her life but kill her fetus. Before giving birth she told her doctor, “If you have to choose, there should be no doubt. Choose—I demand it—the life of the baby.” A week after her daughter was born, Molla died. Her last moments, according to the Vatican, were full of “unspeakable pain.” By honoring this martyr to motherhood the pope clearly was rebuking a feminist movement that sought to free women from the tyranny of biology. Molla, Weigel wrote approvingly, was “a woman whose life and death stood in sharpest contrast to the Cairo draft document’s image of marriage and the family.”
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In his fight against Cairo, though, the pope would use much more than religious symbolism. In addition to being the seat of Catholicism, the Vatican is also a sovereign state, so it is alone among religious entities in claiming official representation at the UN. Since 1964 the Holy See—the government of the Vatican—has had permanent observer status at the world body, the same status Switzerland had at the time, meaning that while it can’t vote in the General Assembly, it can participate in UN conferences and debates much like any other state. Because the language of conference declarations is typically adopted by consensus rather than majority vote, a single holdout can essentially shut down the process. Thus, a country with just over a thousand citizens, most of them celibate men, plays an enormously important role in UN deliberations, especially on social issues. Its representatives are seasoned diplomats and approach topics like abortion with a single-minded fervor often unmatched by the delegations of liberal nations.

A
few months before the conference, 140 papal nuncios—the church’s diplomatic representatives—were summoned to Rome. “John Paul II had decided to declare his own state of war against the United Nations,” Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi wrote in their biography of the pope,
His Holiness
. “He was furious. His closest friend in the Vatican, Cardinal Deskur, had never seen the pope in such a rage.”
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The entire diplomatic machinery of the church was mobilized to pressure sympathetic countries to join the Holy See in opposing the Cairo document. In Bolivia, for example, the church maneuvered to get a liberal women’s rights activist removed from her country delegation; only the intervention of Niek Biegman, the Dutch ambassador to the UN who served as the Cairo conference’s cochair, got her back in. Such behind-the-scenes wrangling happened all over the world, and both Sadik and Biegman continuously circumnavigated the globe to shore up support against the Holy See’s attacks.

There was even an unusually rancorous confrontation between Sadik and the pope himself when she visited him the March before the conference. “He was quite angry about the approach we were taking,” said Sadik. “Why had we taken this new approach to individual rights? And I said, ‘What other kinds of rights are there?’ ”

“There are couples’ rights,” said the pope.

Sadik responded that in societies like her own, women lack equal status in marriage and aren’t even consulted in family decisions. She started talking about unwanted pregnancies caused by rape, including rape within marriage. “I was trying to paint him a picture of women in the developing world,” she said. He listened, and then, she recalled, he said, “Some of the irresponsible behavior of men was perhaps caused by women.” Sadik was stunned.

The conversation lasted less than an hour. Bernstein and Politi note that after Sadik’s visit, “[t]he photographer who routinely took pictures of papal audiences was strangely absent. Evidently, Vatican protocol dictated that Nafis Sadik wasn’t worthy of a photograph.”
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I
n its crusade against the UNFPA the Vatican reached beyond Catholicism to seek an alliance with conservative Muslims. Before the Cairo conference Vatican officials met with representatives of the World Muslim League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the World Muslim Congress, emerging with a statement criticizing the UN for undermining family values. “An aggressive and extreme individualism is ultimately destructive of society and can lead to a situation of moral decadence, promiscuity and breakdown of values,” it said. Later that summer the papal envoy in Tehran, Monsignor Romeo Panciroli, met with representatives of the Iranian government; shortly after, a senior Iranian official announced that the Vatican had Iran’s “full endorsement” on opposition to reproductive rights language in the Cairo document.
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In August the official Libyan press agency reported that Vatican diplomats were supporting Libya’s attempts to resolve its differences with Western governments, which shunned the country since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. “The press agency linked this supposed Vatican assistance to Libya’s condemnation of the Cairo document,” reported the
International Herald Tribune
.
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Soon Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a major center of Islamic learning, joined the opposition to the draft conference statement.

“The Vatican sent emissaries to every Muslim country asking them not to attend the conference, or not to send anyone important,” said Sadik. “They mounted a huge démarche. I also then called the U.S., the UK and all the Muslim countries myself, and suggested they should start a démarche also. I myself called many leaders whom I knew very well, including Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. The climate in the countries was a little bit tense, because they were worried about the religious leaders. Benazir was being advised by the minister of foreign affairs that maybe it was something she should just skip. But she was bold enough—she came.” Two other female Muslim leaders— Prime Ministers Tansu Çiller of Turkey and Khaleda Zia of Bangladesh—got cold feet. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Lebanon boycotted entirely.