By K. Govindan WITH ALL the fuss the Vatican created at the Cairo summit, you would have thought it was a conference on abortion and not the International Conference on Population and Development.
The Holy See, a mini-state populated entirely by men and boasting a birth rate of zero, stalled the conference for a week on paragraph 8:25 of the draft declaration which it read as condoning the right to abortion on demand.
In fact the text only recognised that with between 50 and 60 million abortions performed worldwide each year, an estimated 250,000 women are dying from back street operations and this is a primary concern for women's health campaigners.
Failed alliance
Meanwhile, the so-called "Holy Alliance" between the Catholic Church and Muslim countries didn't materialise.
Many Muslim countries tolerate when the woman's life is at risk. Even Iran is now vigorously pushing family planning programmes.
The women Prime Ministers of Turkey and Bangladesh who stayed away did so to avoid antagonising fundamentalist movements. Muslim delegations concentrated on removing references to what they understood to be "sexual and not reproductive rights".
By choosing to focus on abortion and not contraception, the Vatican accepted that most of its flock is disobeying it anyway.
All delegations accepted the premise of the conference, that at current fertility rates there will be 12.5 billion people by 2050, but if the "programme of action" is implemented there would be 7.8 billion, the difference being the world's current population.
The implication of this is no longer the Malthusian nightmare that population growth would outstrip food production (that correlation has be empirically disproved) but of large-scale human migrations from the poor countries to the rich and intensified environmental degradation.
In reality, there is consensus between the developed countries and their neo-colonies that curbs on population growth are necessary to prevent social and political chaos.
Authoritarian regimes in poorer countries fear being overthrown if they cannot meet the expectations of their people. Western countries are concerned that demands on natural resources in the Third World will affect supply to their economies.
The social context within which targets are to be reached is possibly the best aspect of the conference declaration.
It rightly identifies the importance of "1. education, especially for girls; 2. infant, child and maternal mortality reduction and 3. universal access to family planning and reproductive health services."
Feminist success These aspirations reflect the success of the feminist movement in placing the woman and not her womb at the centre of any sensible population.
Unfortunately, these are only "goals" in the official rhetoric and unsurprisingly there is no binding political and financial commitment in this area.
We should be cautious too about the use of terms like "empowerment of women" and "reproductive rights".
The US government among others admit that their involvement in coercive programmes like forced sterilisation in Latin America have exposed the oppressive and selective nature of any population control scheme.
To mask this, feminist language is appropriated so that the woman's right to choose seems to be their prime consideration.
The fundamentalism that affects most women is the international monetary fundamentalism of neo-liberal economic policies which makes early marriage a survival strategy, reduces health care and removes food subsidies.
Literacy
Where birth rates have gone down, even in poor countries, it is because of political and economic conditions: freely elected governments, land reform, literacy drives, minimum wage laws, food security and so on.
Crucial to this is improving the status of women within the family and society and their economic advancement though rural credit schemes and co-operatives.
None of this is possible without challenging the unfair and unjust distribution of wealth between and within countries and the patriarchal nature of society. That is why the Cairo conference centred on a symptom of poverty and exploitation and not its root cause.