c. 1999 Religion New Service
(Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an independent group that supports health and reproductive rights for women on both the national and international level.)
UNDATED _ The more things change, the more they stay the same _ an old saw, but a universal one, even on the largest scale.
At a major United Nations conference on population and development in 1994 in Cairo, the principal story line in a wave of news coverage was the Vatican and a handful of conservative states against the world on issues of family planning and reproductive health.
Five years later, the nations of the world came together again at a U.N. Special Session of the General Assembly earlier this month to review progress on the Cairo conference’s program for approaching population and development challenges.
In contrast to the Cairo meeting, there was little news media attention focused on the meeting, but the story line remained the same: The Vatican and a few countries _ primarily Libya, Argentina, Sudan and Guatemala _ against the rest of the world.
Indeed, in the year leading up to the 1994 conference, the Vatican captured the rapt attention of the news media with its no-holds-barred campaign against the population and development conference. Pope John Paul II called the conference the”snare of the devil”in light of its support for increased access to contraception and other elements of reproductive health care. It promulgated a”culture of death,”the pope said, and intended to destroy the family.
These aspersions were aimed at a program that puts women’s health and rights at the center of population and development policies, recognizes that couples and individuals should have access to safe and effective methods of contraception and, in light of the fact that 80,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions, acknowledges that unsafe abortion is a major health problem in countries where it is illegal.
In the intervening years since the Cairo conference _ and out of the exposing light of media attention _ the Vatican has relentlessly opposed implementation of the Cairo agreements and anything else church officials even suspect of expanding access to reproductive health care. In this mission, their actions have at times bordered on the unbelievable.
At the United Nations’ women’s conference in Beijing, which followed the Cairo meeting by a year, Vatican delegates repeatedly tried to block inclusion of the concept of safe motherhood _ ensuring that all women have access to the information and care they need to go safely through pregnancy and childbirth _ in that meeting’s agreements, saying they feared it was a code for legal abortion.
Church officials the world over have campaigned against condoms, even in places like Africa, where HIV and AIDS are taking an immense toll on human life and health. Some top church officials have gone so far as to assert that condoms actually cause AIDS. Mexican Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera, for example, demanded in 1997 that condoms carry warning labels stating,”Use of this product is harmful to health.”In 1996 in Kenya, where 1 million of the country’s population of 26 million are HIV-positive, Cardinal Maurice Otunga ceremoniously burned boxes of condoms and safe sex pamphlets in front of a crowd.
Also in 1996, Vatican officials tried to hobble the fund-raising efforts of UNICEF, the United Nations agency that does the most to help needy children around the world, because of an unfounded suspicion that the agency was distributing contraception and advocating legal abortion. The Vatican held back its annual donation to UNICEF. Far worse, it told dioceses around the world to review their own contributions to the children’s fund and to consider ceasing to sell UNICEF greeting cards, a major source of funding for the organization.
And just recently, the Vatican announced its opposition to agencies making available emergency contraception to raped Kosovar refugees. This flies not only in the face of human decency, but also the spirit of the Cairo consensus and recent plans for further action presented to the General Assembly asserting refugees must be given adequate health services, including family planning.
But the Vatican swims against the flow. For the General Assembly just ended, the majority of the world’s nations succeeded in crafting a report, based on five years’ experience, that continues to put women’s health and rights at the center of population and development policies, and that calls for increased access to sexuality education and reproductive health services.
No handful of arch-conservative delegations, not even the Holy See, will turn back the tide.
DEA END KISSLING
