Women: Between Abortion, Cloning and Prostitution
Another Battle at the UN

By Marie and Joseph Meaney


The United Nations made a highly significant pro-life move on March 8, 2005. This will come as a surprise to many HLI Special Reports readers who have seen numerous accounts of the different anti-life activities by UN agencies and at UN meetings in the past decades. The United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning calls on all member states to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.”

The UN General Assembly approved the measure by a vote of 84 countries in favor vs. 34 against. In a typical example of UN inefficiency, at least five nations who had expressed their desire to vote for the ban did not manage to arrive on time to vote; despite our best efforts to mobilize their participation, 37 others chose to abstain even though many were in favor of the ban on cloning. We, my wife Marie and I, were privileged to be at the UN headquarters in New York doing pro-life work for HLI from February 28th to March 11th during which the historic vote took place. We were accompanied by several HLI delegates from Latin America led by Julia Regina de Cardenal, director of the HLI affiliate in El Salvador. The UN declaration concluded four years of hard work by pro-lifers and especially by the government of Costa Rica to have a universal call to ban human cloning. It is also important to note that the Bush administration solidly backed the measure, and many believed a Kerry administration would have managed to kill it.

A near total media blackout surrounded this UN- declaration, one of the most important since its founding. The main reason was a liberal bias in the press favoring a very different kind of ban. Some European Union nations and others, intent upon defending the interests of their bio-tech industry, pushed until the very end for a human cloning ban which only covered reproductive cloning and allowed for “therapeutic cloning.” What they call “therapeutic” is the creation of human embryos through cloning for the purpose of harvesting their stem cells or organs resulting in the child’s death in a shocking kind of scientific cannibalism. The developing nations also insisted that language be included to protect women from being used as “human egg farms” for the millions of ova that would be needed to do “therapeutic” cloning on a massive scale.

This all occurred during the sessions of Beijing +10, the ten year review conference following the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. At that time the Clinton administration, with Hilary Clinton personally leading the charge, had pushed strongly for an international woman’s “right to abortion”. The Holy See, other countries and pro-life non-governmental organizations (NGOs) courageously fought and prevented this from happening. Nonetheless, the “Beijing Platform for Action” document has been used by radical groups to argue for just such a “right.”

How times have changed! Pro-lifers and the Bush administration now insisted on an explicit clarification that the Beijing document does not include a “right to abortion.” Therefore the American delegation under ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey proposed an amendment to the official Beijing +10 Declaration, stating that: “they [the original Platform for Action and the new Declaration] do not create any new international human rights and that they do not include the right to abortion.” This continues the positive trend of the pro-life side going on the offensive rather than only fighting defensive battles as in the past.

For one week, liberal countries such as the European Union (EU), New Zealand, Canada, Australia, South-Africa as well as radical NGOs fought the US-proposed amendment while HLI and the pro-life coalition supported the inclusion of the unambiguous pro-life statement. The tactics the other side used turned against them, however, for they kept repeating that the original Beijing-document does not include the “right to abortion” and that it was therefore unnecessary to put this in writing. They never explained why they were so adamant about preventing the pro-life language from entering the document, if it was redundant. Instead, they accused the US of blocking progress and further discussions, whereas this was precisely what they were doing. In the mean time we were lobbying aggressively to support the US-proposed pro-life amendments and had to admire their firm and principled stance. Though the amendment was ultimately not accepted, it ended with a positive outcome for the pro-life side, since liberal countries and radical NGOs were forced to make reiterated statements re-affirming that abortion is not included as a human right.

It takes a special kind of patience to do pro-life work at UN meetings. The proceedings can go on almost endlessly over major or minute points of difference in the wording of declarations and treaties. Marie and I monitored the sessions and discussed with country delegates the pro-life merits of the language being discussed day after day. Crucial meetings are often closed to NGO delegates, however, and so the pro-life representatives must speak with international ministers and ambassadors in the hallways and corridors in various languages. Despite the frustrations and exhausting work associated with these meetings, they can bear fruit in unexpected ways. Marie and I first met as young pro-life delegates to the Second UN World Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul, Turkey in 1996 and we married in 2000. Whereas our group of five college students was a rarity among the professional pro-lifers then, one now finds dozens of students from places like the Franciscan University of Steubenville and Regina Apostolorum in Rome who come to volunteer and enthusiastically support the pro-life cause.

The UN attracts the most varied kinds of birds. We saw several individuals whose gender was not easily discernable. The “Youth for Women’s Rights Caucus” passed around a flier at the end of the conference, demanding abortion, contraception, comprehensive sex-education and that the UN “recognize and protect the right to sexual pleasure and to enjoy our sexuality free of shame, guilt, violence and coercion.” The Journal of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), inappropriately named “Conscience”, was distributed, featuring an article on the pro-life situation in Lithuania attacking HLI and Father Tom Euteneuer for promoting an “extreme conservative Catholic position.” They recognize HLI is a major opponent to their agenda of contraception, abortion and sex-education. On the other end of the spectrum, there were several Franciscan Friars of the Renewal standing out in their grey habits and bringing back some sanity to this Tower of Babel. One sometimes gets the feeling at UN-headquarters that one is walking around an airport terminal all day long without ever going anywhere.

However, great progress was made on the issue of human trafficking and prostitution. The US proposed a resolution against international sex trafficking, since this is one of the most common and terrible forms of women’s exploitation around the world. The Bush administration has made this a top priority, and at face value it would seem that a conference on women’s rights would enthusiastically embrace this initiative. Some nations, with New Zealand and the EU in the lead, rejected any reference to prostitution or sexual exploitation, preferring a more vague reference to exploitation in general. The motivation seemed to be liberal laws and attitudes in these countries in favor of legalized prostitution. A shocking statistic circulating at the conference was that 5 % of the Dutch economy comes from their sex-industry, and the money has increased by 25% over the last decade. Their lame argument that legalizing prostitution prevents trafficking is proven wrong by the fact that 70% of their prostitutes are from Central and Eastern Europe. The American proposal focused on punishing the traffickers and clients rather than prosecuting the many enslaved prostitutes – a model that has worked well in the otherwise liberal country of Sweden. The resolution was in danger of being blocked, but thanks to the aggressive lobbying by our pro-life coalition passed and was even co-sponsored by 50 countries. The distribution of a flier entitled “Pimps and Panderers: Governments block consensus on resolution to protect women from sexual exploitation” made a great impact, shaming the liberal nations into relenting in their public opposition. HLI has long seen the significance of the issue and has contributed to the rehabilitation of former prostitutes all over the world.

HLI-supporters should take pride in the ground gained through the pro-life work at the UN since the 1990s. Such concrete measures as the UN ban on cloning and the Doha Declaration passed by the UN General Assembly in December 2004 defining marriage as the union of a husband and a wife and recognizing the fundamental importance of the family to society have all become official UN pronouncements. The feminist-inspired daily newspaper at Beijing +10 reported the event was “a reality check” and a disappointment for the activists who saw it as “Beijing Betrayed”. Our HLI group and all the pro-lifers left encouraged and inspired to continue, since most of the nations of the world are clearly pro-life and need our support to prevent a small group of countries from imposing their radical anti-life agenda on the world. Many HLI-leaders actively followed the events and supported us in their respective countries during the UN-conference for which we are very grateful. This is the time to press forward.