Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 15, 1994 TAG: 9409160015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Rather than governmental intrusion forcing sterilizations or abortions, as has occurred in some Third World countries, the international community has formally recognized that women must have more control, not less, over reproductive decisions - and, indeed, over all aspects of their lives.
In the Arab world, which hosted the conference, and in many other places, the lot of women remains grimly subservient, of course. Gradually, though, people the globe over are realizing the need to "empower" women. Affording them the education and opportunity to make better lives for themselves and their families - plus making accessible the means to plan family size - is not only a good thing in itself. It's the key to stabilizing population growth.
Experience has shown that the better educated women are, the fewer children they bear. It has also shown that women (who now perform two-thirds of the world's work, while receiving one-tenth of the world's income and owning less than 1 percent of the world's property) tend to have fewer children if they earn income outside the home.
Essential to empowering women, meantime, is a commitment - which is also part of the 20-year action plan approved by the Cairo conference - to stimulate economic development in poor nations. And essential to the long-term success of that goal is conservation of environmental resources. Future prosperity in affluent North and impoverished South alike will require sustainable development.
Though the Vatican and its fundamentalist Muslim allies succeeded in diverting much of the attention of the conference to the abortion issue, the draft document never proposed to extend the right to safe, legal abortions to those nations that now forbid it. It did, however, seek to focus attention on the estimated 25 million unsafe, illegal abortions that occur each year. As the nonbinding Cairo agreement notes, proper use of contraception made readily available can help reduce the appalling numbers of unwanted pregnancies that are terminated this way.
In spite of the fundamentalist uproar, the Cairo conference reflected the emergence of an increasingly subtle understanding of population issues.
Reducing child-mortality rates, for example, is now understood as a means of stabilizing rather than increasing population growth, by convincing families that they needn't have so many children. Economic development is now understood as a potential benefit rather than threat to the environment, insofar as prosperity tends to bring down birth rates. And efforts to "control" population growth are now understood as a hindrance rather than a help to effective population policy, which requires freeing women and families to determine their own destiny.
Each country is free to pursue the Cairo goals in ways that don't conflict with its own laws, culture and religious traditions. Yet the basic orientation - human and economic development, environmental protection, and empowerment of women - was agreed to by all. Achieved by so diverse and still overwhelmingly patriarchal a gathering, this consensus is a hopeful development for the future of our planet.
by CNB