US targets population growth, urges women's power

US targets population growth, urges women's power

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Source: Associated Press Worldstream
Author: EDITH M. LEDERER

WASHINGTON -- The new U.S. ambassador for global women's issues pledged Thursday the Obama administration's "deep commitment" to a U.N. blueprint aimed at slowing the world's population explosion and empowering women.

At the heart of the more than 100-page action plan adopted at the U.N. population conference in Cairo, Egypt, 15 years ago is a demand for women's equality through education, economic development, access to modern birth control and the right to choose if and when to become pregnant.

Underlying the conference was the record growth in global population and research, which shows that educated women choose to have fewer children. In 1994, when delegates from 180 countries met in Cairo, the population was 5.7 billion. According to the latest U.N. estimates, it will hit 7 billion early in 2012 and top 9 billion in 2050.

The U.S. ambassador, Melanne Verveer, said President Barack Obama's decision to contribute $50US million to the U.N. Population Fund for family planning, an increase of more than 100 percent over the last U.S. contribution, in 2001, "will send an unambiguous signal to the world that the U.S. supports the Cairo Platform for Action."

The Bush administration cut off money to the fund because of claims, denied by the U.N. agency, that it supported forced abortions and sterilizations in China.

Verveer, former chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was first lady, spoke at a luncheon honoring Dr. Nafis Sadik on her 80th birthday.

Verveer praised the Pakistani obstetrician-gynecologist for framing "the vision" of the Cairo plan that linked development, human rights, women's rights and reproductive health for the first time.

Sadik, a former head of the U.N. Population Fund, was secretary-general of the Cairo conference.

"I wanted to come here today to clearly reiterate the renewed and deep commitment of the United States government to the ... Program of Action, and the Obama administration's steadfast determination to continue to work with other governments and NGOs to meet the goals we have set," she said.

Clinton, now secretary of state, told a conference of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in Houston last month "that reproductive rights and the umbrella issue of women's rights and empowerment is going to be a key to the foreign policy of this administration." She stressed the link between women's rights and democracy.

"A society that denies and demeans women's rights and roles is a society that is more likely to engage in behavior that is negative, anti-democratic and leads to violence and extremism," she said after receiving the federation's Margaret Sanger Award named for its founder for her work on behalf of women's health and reproductive rights.

Tim Wirth, who led the U.S. delegation at the Cairo conference, called the Program of Action "a revolutionary document" because "it really is ultimately about the transfer of political power."

"That's why it's been so difficult," said Wirth, who is now president of the United Nations Foundation. "That's why it's been so controversial. There's a finite amount of political power in the world and what this document did in so many ways was to transfer a lot of political power from men to women."

Sadik, taking up the point, thanked Verveer "for capturing the spirit of the Cairo message" and expressed hope that she would convey to the Obama administration "how important it is to transfer power really to women equally no more, no less and to take away the power from men who have much more, and not what they actually deserve."

"So I hope that will be the message," she said. "Equality is the name of the game and our real message."

Sadik, who currently is a special representative of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on HIV/AIDS and global health issues, said 15 years after Cairo the first thing that needs to be done is "shed the baggage" that the Bush administration "put on us ... so unnecessarily" and move forward.

"I hope that the U.S. diplomatic policy, defense policy and development policy are all going to focus on the rights of women and make that the underpinning for anything else that they may do in a developing country," she said.

"We need urgently to increase family planning and reduce maternal mortality," Sadik said. "It is, frankly, a crime against humanity that half a million women are allowed to die every year as a direct consequence of pregnancy."

She also decried "the distortions of religion" that deny women their human rights and "bigots" who fall back on cultural values to deny rights to girls and women especially on matters of reproductive and sexual health.

In Sadik's honor, the United Nations Foundation, which sponsored the lunch, announced that it was establishing a fund to help some of the more than 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world.