The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (20 page)

The Vatican-Muslim alliance was never really about birth control or abortion, since most interpretations of Islam don’t share the church’s absolutist stance on either. To be sure, abortion is highly restricted under Islam, but not the way it is in Catholic teachings. Islamic jurisprudence differs as to when, after conception, a fetus is “created”—some scholars say 40 days, some 90 days, some 120 days. “If the mother is endangered by the pregnancy, all schools bow to medical opinion and permit a therapeutic abortion,” Donna Lee Bowen wrote in the
International Journal of Middle East Studies
.
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Health-mandated abortion is allowed in both Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Conservative Muslims tend to differ even more with Catholics on contraception. Concerned over population pressures, Iran’s Islamic government has at times been a keen advocate for family planning and a major provider of contraceptives and voluntary sterilizations; their use was sanctioned by a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini.
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(Not that that made the American Life Lobby’s charges that Richard Benedick had cooperated with the shah on a campaign against the Islamic family any less inflammatory.) No Muslim country bans birth control.

F
or the Vatican and its Muslim allies, what was at stake went far beyond family planning. Throughout the 1990s international law was changing in crucial ways that increasingly put the rights of individual women above the rights of groups to preserve their traditional customs and hierarchies. In 1993 the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights declared, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.” Cairo intended to take this new international commitment even further, and the Beijing women’s conference in 1995 would carry it further still. An amorphous architecture of soft power was evolving, with NGOs helping to shape international declarations that were then used by various bodies to interpret international law.

Of course, all this could appear terribly ephemeral. These UN documents are unenforceable and more often ignored than implemented. Sometimes the elevated rhetoric of international law appears grotesque when juxtaposed to sordid reality. While diplomats spoke loftily of human rights in Vienna, a few hundred miles away ethnic cleansing made a hell of Bosnia and a mockery of international ideals. Women’s rights were enshrined in international law while, once again, mass rape was deployed as a weapon of war.

Yet if the terrible ways the international system falls short overshadow whatever progress it makes, that doesn’t mean the progress is insignificant. In fact the victories women won at these various conferences had much more than merely rhetorical impact. Armed with these agreements, women around the world have succeeded in pressuring their own governments to live up to them, and have sometimes been able to appeal to international human rights courts when they don’t. The idea that women’s rights could trump even so inviolate a principle as national sovereignty was something new in the world.

The importance of these UN declarations can be hard to see from the United States because they carry no weight here: An American lawyer, judge, or politician who challenged a domestic law on the ground that it violated a global agreement would be either ignored or reviled. (When Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy cited international norms in the Court’s ruling that the execution of minors is unconstitutional, prominent conservatives howled for his impeachment.) In Europe and many developing countries, though, the dynamics are different, and it’s not uncommon for judges to invoke international agreements, or for national laws to be brought into accordance with them.

This is easiest to see when it comes to treaties like the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which has been ratified by every nation in the world save the United States, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Qatar, and a handful of Pacific Islands states. The United States originally played a strong role in drafting the treaty, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. Among other things, CEDAW calls for countries to establish the legal equality of women and men; to eliminate discrimination in education and employment; and to “modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.”

Prejudices against women obviously remain very much intact in most of the world. Nevertheless, CEDAW matters. In Tanzania a court cited the treaty when overturning a law that prohibited women from inheriting clan land from their fathers. In Colombia the treaty was used to secure constitutional protections against domestic violence, which had previously been seen as a private matter outside the penal code. In an Indian legal case stemming from the gang rape of a woman by men she worked with, a court found “that by ratifying CEDAW and by making official commitments at the 1995 Beijing world conference on women, India had endorsed the international standard of women’s human rights,” and thus had to protect women from sexual abuse and harassment.
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As a treaty, CEDAW is more binding than the declarations that come out of global conferences like Cairo and Beijing. But they work in synergy: As the India decision shows, international declarations can determine how legal treaties like CEDAW are interpreted. The statements that emerged from the meetings in the 1990s also had a kind of persuasive power. The Cairo program of action contained—for the first time ever—an explicit call for countries to eliminate female circumcision. Soon after a number of African nations, including Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Tanzania, and Togo, outlawed the practice.
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The outcome of Cairo would determine how a great many international aid organizations operated in the field. “Since Cairo, UNFPA, UNHCR, the Red Cross, and a host of international NGOs have joined to provide reproductive health services to women in emergency situations,” Sadik pointed out in a 1999 speech. “The latest such effort is in response to the Kosovo crisis, where an estimated dozen or so children were born daily just in Albania’s camps.”

Finally, the notion that reproductive rights are human rights would transform the major human rights organizations. In 2003, Human Rights Watch undertook an analysis of international law pertaining to reproductive rights. “We came to the conclusion that not [just] in our opinion, but in the opinion of those authorized to interpret international human rights law and to state where it is right now, women have a right to decide over their bodies, including in matters related to abortion,” said Marianne Møllmann, the advocacy director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch. As a result, in 2004 Human Rights Watch adopted the position that the denial of reproductive choice is a denial of human rights, and it now documents violations—including forced sterilization and employer-mandated pregnancy tests—all over the world. Amnesty International followed suit in 2007, calling for the right to abortion in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the life and health of the pregnant woman, and for the decriminalization of abortion worldwide.

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ll these epochal issues swirled around Cairo, rendering every word of every official sentence enormously fraught. Despite all the public drama, as in most international conferences much of what mattered happened out of sight. Hammering out the final document was a painstaking, often miserable process, with delegates sitting in small, windowless rooms and negotiating until 3:00 or 4:00 A.m. It took tremendous stamina to keep up the fight since, while great existential divides underlie much of the debate, the process itself was often concerned with the pettiest linguistic minutia, seemingly irrelevant but potentially packed with hidden meanings.

The absurd parsing hit its apotheosis at a late-night session toward the end of the conference when, a Dutch diplomat recalled, a delegate from Iran said, “Mr. Chairman, I propose to delete the words ‘fertility regulation.’ Mr. Chairman, I want to delete it from the text.” Then he added, “And I want to replace it with the words ‘regulation of fertility.’ ”

The head of the Swedish delegation, one of the most ardent supporters of reproductive rights, was immediately suspicious. What was behind this maneuver? “Let’s ask for a time-out!” he said to his Dutch colleague. Taking a break, they conferred outside. It turned out that the Iranians objected to the phrase “fertility regulation” because according to the World Health Organization definition it could include “interrupting unwanted pregnancies.” By using slightly different wording the Iranian representative could assure his government that he had not acceded to the right to abortion.

“It was torture,” said the Dutch diplomat. Yet all this painfully precise wrangling also opened up fissures between the Vatican and some of the Muslim countries. The alliance was always shaky, both because of mutual distrust and because the Muslim nations wouldn’t stand firm with the pope against birth control. Catholic and Muslim differences about family planning could be glossed over in the run-up to Cairo, when newspapers were full of stories about their “unholy alliance.” But in the excruciating technical negotiations of the conference itself, Muslim states were willing to make deals on reproductive issues, because their bigger concern was promiscuity and homosexuality, which they saw encompassed in the words “sexual rights.” By agreeing to drop that phrase Germain got the Iranian representative to agree to language on “adolescents’ sexual and reproductive health and rights,” something the church never would have done.

Meanwhile, Egypt, as the host of the conference, was heavily invested in making it a success. Bitterness was mounting as the Holy See’s delegation blocked a compromise statement on abortion. The draft said that in countries where abortion is legal it should be safe. The Vatican found this unacceptable. Seeking to both mollify the church and to criticize the Soviet practice of relying on abortion as a primary form of birth control, Biegman added the sentence: “In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.” But the Holy See rejected that, too. Breaking protocol, frustrated delegates yelled and booed. Maher Mahran, Egyptian minister of state for population and family affairs, joined in the criticism. “Does the Vatican rule the world?” he asked. “We respect the Vatican, we respect the pope, but we don’t accept anyone to impose his ideas. If they are not going to negotiate, why did they come?”
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Distraught at the mounting anger, the Vatican softened its stance. Without assenting to the language on abortion, it allowed the negotiations to advance. Eventually, after ten agonizing days, a remarkable final document emerged. “Advancing gender equality and equity and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women’s ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programmes,” it said. The statement declared reproductive rights to be universal and called on all the nations of the world to put women’s empowerment at the center of the agenda. All governments and relevant NGOs, it said, need “to deal with the health impact of unsafe abortion as a major public health concern.” Adolescents, it said, should be given comprehensive sex education and reproductive health services. Female circumcision should be banned. Demographic targets and quotas should be jettisoned. The agenda of the International Women’s Health Coalition, once dismissed as quixotic and radical, would henceforth have a global imprimatur.

Not wanting to be isolated, eventually the Holy See joined the consensus, though it rejected the sections dealing with reproductive rights and abortion, and reiterated its objection to the use of condoms in HIV-prevention programs. (On contentious UN agreements such an à la carte approach by member countries is not uncommon.) “Some interpreted the final Vatican stand—to partially endorse the document—as an effort by the church to start rebuilding bridges within the diplomatic community,” said the
National Catholic Reporter
.
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Later, Weigel even tried to give the pope credit for the triumph of humanism over demographic utilitarianism. “By appealing to the better angels of a universal human nature through the power of the word,” he wrote, “John Paul had forced the moral core of the population argument onto the center of the world stage, changed the nature of the public debate, and helped shift the framework of discussion from ‘controlling’ population to empowering women.”
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At Cairo, though, there was no question who the real winners were. When the gavel went down to close the meeting, the women’s rights activists erupted in gleeful triumph, dancing down the aisles of the conference center. The dancing continued that night at a party on a barge sailing down the Nile. “It was a moment I never would’ve thought of in the years of my professional work leading up to Cairo,” said Germain. “It was just such a victory for and by women. It was a pushback to the Holy See big time. It was a pushback even to the Islamic group, because of the commitments on adolescents. It was really a big deal.”
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The Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien called it “the greatest diplomatic defeat the Vatican has sustained in the 20th century.”
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