Bush backs off population pact
By Jodi Enda
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has announced it no longer can support a landmark international agreement that established reproductive health care as a means to curb population growth, according to a United Nations official.
In announcing Thursday at a U.N. meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, that the United States would not reaffirm its support for the 1994 "program of action," State Department official Louise Oliver said the Bush administration objected to such terms as "reproductive services" and "reproductive health care" because they imply a right to abortion.
The U.N. official, who was at the meeting, said Oliver stated unequivocally that the Bush administration position was nonnegotiable.
Officials from the State Department and the Health and Human Services Department, both represented at the Bangkok meeting, did not respond to repeated inquiries Thursday and yesterday.
The administration also is pushing for a new international campaign promoting sexual abstinence, particularly among adolescents, the U.N. official said.
Supporters of the plan, adopted in Cairo, Egypt, by 179 nations, said yesterday that withdrawal of U.S. support could undermine the entire international community's approach to population control and women's health care in developing nations.
The 8-year-old agreement has dramatically changed how countries around the world work to control population growth from a system driven by targets and quotas — which led to involuntary birth-control measures — to one that focuses on access to health care and education.
"This hit like a bombshell," said the senior U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "People were stunned."
The Bangkok statement by Oliver, a special assistant in the State Department's population office, is the Bush administration's most recent attempt to infuse its anti-abortion stance into international policy.
Last summer, the administration cut off the United States' $34 million 2002 contribution to the United Nations' family-planning program. In May, the administration led a bitter fight to remove references to "reproductive services," which it interpreted to include abortions, from a U.N. document on the well-being of children.
"Poverty reduction will not be successful without reproductive health and without women being able to make their own choices," said Agnes Van Ardenne, the Dutch minister for Development Cooperation.
Francoise Girard of the International Women's Health Coalition, a nonprofit organization that promotes women's reproductive health worldwide, said the Cairo agreement was critical to fighting AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, allowing women to control their fertility and preventing unintended pregnancies that lead to abortions.
"This is a very profound shift for the United States," Girard said. "It contradicts their stated support for women's rights around the world."
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