At the heart of the frenzy is a profound culture clash – one that the world will revisit over and over in the coming years. Though the U.N. conference is ostensibly about population, its real topic is women’s rights. The draft program of action proposes that a full range of reproductive and health-care services, including contraception and sex education, should be made available to all. But the essence of the conference goes beyond advocating increased family planning: “Advancing gender equity and the empowerment of women,” says the draft plan, “is a cornerstone of population programs.”
The motto of the conference might have been “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the title of a book and a rallying cry for American feminists a quarter of a century ago. It’s a simple notion: what happens to a woman should be her decision and entirely within her control. And it’s a good American ideal – that all individuals have rights. But applied to other cultures, it has explosive connotations. Women may be entering the global work force in ever-increasing numbers, taking jobs ranging from prime minister to factory worker in the developing world’s sweatshops. Yet the battle for women’s equality, hardly easy in America, can be a recipe for turmoil in more traditional societies. Some Muslim clerics, from lands where women are still hidden by veils and where the Koran’s teachings on women’s status still have force, accused the West of “cultural imperialism.” Bowing to domestic pressure, the female prime ministers of Turkey and Bangladesh decided not to attend, while Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Sudan boycotted the proceedings entirely. On the eve of the talks, Islamic militants in Cairo vowed to disrupt what they called a “conference of licentiousness”; the Egyptian government, which has reason to fear the power of local fundamentalists, promptly swarmed over the old city with security forces.
Urging on the Islamic protest was the Vatican, which accused the United Nations of trying to establish a worldwide right to abortion and demeaning the importance of the family (page 24). Catholic priests attacked the draft program for allegedly encouraging homo-sexuality and adolescent sex, and the Clinton administration found itself in an embarrassing spat with the Holy See, which attacked Gore personally. The language of the draft program, claimed the pope’s spokesman, was “synonymous with abortion on demand” and gives “practically unlimited sexual rights not only to adolescents but also to children.”
The American camp was bemused. For those who had labored on the Cairo agenda for three years, the conference was meant to be – in Gore’s words – a time of “hope, opportunity and progress.” Timothy Wirth, under secretary of state for global affairs, is so convinced that population control is the world’s “central issue” that he keeps a silver bowl of condoms in his office. But instead of going to Cairo celebrating U.S. leadership on population, he and Gore found that with the best of intentions they had stumbled into a minefield.
Why? Because matters of population do not exist in a moral and cultural vacuum. There’s no mystery about how you stabilize population. You do it by both making contraception available and by improving women’s education. “Education and employment help to make women more powerful,” says Amartya Sen of Harvard University. And there, in a nutshell, is the case for women’s “empowerment.” Take Thailand as an example. Thirty years ago it was as poor as many African countries. But successive governments have stressed the importance of women’s health and education. Female literacy has increased to 90 percent; 85 percent of both girls and boys have primary education; and 45 percent of the labor force is female. And the average number of babies born to each woman has decreased from six in the late 1960s to just 2.1 today.
What’s controversial about women’s empowerment? Presented with some sensitivity to differing cultural traditions, nothing at all. But the draft program at Cairo is far from sensitive. Imagine political correctness married to U.N.-committee-speak, and you’ll get the flavor. The plan stops just short of urging governments to get in touch with their feelings, but has plenty of other absurdities. “Sexual health,” reads the document, “is the integration of somatic, emotional, intellectual and social aspects of sexual being . . .”; “Governments should use television soap operas and other traditional media to encourage discussion of sensitive topics . . .”
The language matters, because much of the business in Cairo will turn on finding new pledges of money for programs, and the plan will be used to bid for funding. And even more important, the draft plan has drawn battle lines that seemed to put women on one side of the barricades and families on the other. Comments by Joan Dunlop, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, and Annette Kane, executive director of America’s National Council of Catholic Women, neatly encapsulate the differences. The Vatican, says Dunlop, is “not interested in individual women.” Replies Kane: “The church believes that the family should make decisions about the family.”
The problem is that “the family” means different things in different places. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and so almost by definition has accepted that family ties can be easily sundered. One in two children lives in something other than the traditional nuclear family; since de Tocqueville first marveled at the range of American voluntary organizations, people have looked to loose “networks” of friends for social cohesion. In such a society, it’s easy to argue that women’s decisions should be strictly personal; who else should be allowed to make them?
Americans, if they’re lucky, say they have a family. But in most of Asia, and in Muslim and Catholic countries, people belong to one. And it’s not just Mom and Dad and the kids; you may be your brother’s keeper, and your great-aunt’s too. Your family is tied to a certain place, to a certain history, and often to a class from which it’s hard to escape. Decisions are often made collectively; a woman’s body may not be considered her own, the child in her womb even less so. In Egypt, for example, it is often grandmothers or older aunts who take young girls to be circumcised. To Western eyes, such practices can make families appear the most repressive institutions imaginable. But in many developing countries, the extended family is the only institution that works – or at least works a lot better (and less coercively) than the state.
Those societies have plenty of internal critics. “Tradition is great,” says Kavel Galhati, an Indian veteran of population policy, “but if tradition is putting women down, it must be changed. Unless women can manage and control their own fertility they cannot manage and control their own lives.” Yet the real strengths of families are ignored in the Cairo document. Yes, it does say that “the family is the basic unit,” but it also demands that attention be paid to the “diversity of family forms.” What kind of diversity? America’s? Catholic and Muslim clerics ask whether that’s an advance. The draft plan recognizes the sexuality of adolescents and the need for them to have sex education. But outside the West, religious groups deeply fear the unbridled sexual experimentation of Western Europe and America. “The perception in the Muslim world,” says Abdurahman Alamoudi, executive director of the American Muslim Council, is “Oh, no; here comes the secular West, which wants to impose its failed culture on us.”
However divisive the possible solutions may be, virtually no one dismisses the problem. The world’s population is increasing at a rate never seen before. It now stands at around 5.7 billion, and, according to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), 94 million new babies are added each year – an annual increase the size of Mexico. Population growth is massively skewed to what are now the poor parts of the world; at pres-ent, 93 percent of births are in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
In one limited sense, the worst is over; fertility rates have been declining around the globe since the 1970s, with birthrates falling from 2.6 to 1.8 in developed countries and from a range of 5-7 to a range of 3-6 in developing ones. Catastrophes once supposed to be the inevitable consequence of rapid population growth have so far been avoided. Since 1945, the boom in population has coincided with the period of fastest, most widespread economic growth the world has ever seen. Plant science has raised agricultural yields to unprecedented levels; improved distribution systems have made localized famine rare.
Yet unnoticed by most of us, the sheer weight of numbers in today’s world is changing the scale of human tragedy. In the 1950s, Aldous Huxley warned: “The catastrophes and crimes of the twentieth century can transform almost ten times as many human universes into private hells as did the catastrophes and crimes of 2,000 years ago.” It’s easy to argue that the press of humanity and inhumanity has cheapened life for all of us.
As if to underscore the urgency of that point, Gore has said that it’s not “irrelevant to note that last year, in Africa, the nation with the highest population density of all was Rwanda.” The Vatican tartly replied that “the population density of Japan is much greater than that of Rwanda and there is no danger of people killing themselves there.” True enough; and that’s the kind of argument made by those who believe that there isn’t a population crisis at all, but a social or economic crisis (page 27). In 1984, at the last U.N. population conference, the United States warned against a “demographic overreaction” and said the real problem was “economic statism.” In other words, with decent economic policies, with an encouragement of initiative and invention, the world will find a way to cope with many more people than it has now. More might even be better.
Not so, argues Robert Cas-sen of Oxford University: “The issue is not whether more people are an advantage, but more healthy, educated and employed people.” Rwanda makes his point. The UNFPA predicts that between now and 2025, Rwanda’s population will increase from 7.8 million to an astonishing 20.6 million. Everyone can agree that Rwanda would be a happier place if it had the social harmony and economy of Japan; but finding such harmony and economic success is immeasurably more difficult at a time of such an increase in population.
That’s the view of the governments of most countries of the world – including many of those with Catholic or Muslim populations. With all those areas of common ground, it’s hard to avoid feeling that some of the language in the Cairo document has made enemies where it was unnecessary to do so. The task of improving the lot of women is hard enough. Of the 960 million illiterate adults in the world, two thirds are women; of the 130 million children denied primary education, 90 million are girls. Women are beaten as a matter of course almost everywhere; they are murdered for their dowries; they have their genitals mutilated. Yet with some ill-chosen words, odd emphases and a tone that sounds grating-ly “modern American,” the Cairo document has antagonized some potentially powerful groups. In the last 30 years the world has come a long way both in trying to stabilize its population and in easing the position of women. It would be a tragedy if Cairo were to hand the initiative to those who were interested in neither.
Percent of those age 15-24 who are illiterate
Female Male Chile 3 4 China 18 5 Egypt 62 37 India 60 34 Iran 58 29 Italy 0.4 0.3 Mexico 9 7 Nepal 85 55 Rwanda 55 40 Pakistan 75 55 Peru 10 4 Thailand 4 2 U.S. 0.6 0.7
Percent of total (1992)
China 43 Egypt 10 France 40 India 25 Iran 19 Isreal 34 Japan 38 Kenya 40 Mexico 27 North Korea 46 Pakistan 13 Sweden 45 U.S. 41
At birth (1994)
Female Male Chile 78 72 China 69 67 Egypt 63 59 France 82 74 Japan 82 76 Kenya 55 51 India 59 58 Isreal 80 76 Mexico 77 69 Nepal 53 52 North Korea 73 67 Pakistan 58 57 Peru 68 63 Somalia 55 54 Sweden 81 75 Thailand 72 65 U.S. 79 73 Zimbabwe 44 40
Percent of currently married women using contraception
Chile 43 China 71 Egypt 47 France 80 India 45 Iran 23 Japan 64 Kenya 33 Mexico 53 Pakistan 12 Peru 59 South Korea 77 Sweden 78 Thailand 66 U.S. 74 Zimbabwe 43
