Among the Intellectualoids / Bella's Babies
Waller, John Michael
Bella's Babies by John Michael Waller Keith Tucci attended the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo last fall as a reporter for the Cabarrus County...
...Bella's Babies by John Michael Waller Keith Tucci attended the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo last fall as a reporter for the Cabarrus County News of North Carolina...
...The left-wing Christian magazine Sojourners devoted its August issue to accusationsthat the Cairo conference was a "subterfuge" for a racist agenda of Third World population control...
...In its quest to get some sort of Vatican endorsement, the Clinton delegation watered down what most of its trueallies wanted, retaining ambiguities that leave the door open to extreme interpretations in the future...
...Clinton emerged to tell reporters that he and the Pope had come closer together in their views—a statement promptly answered by a Vatican spokesman, who said that if that was the case, the president must have changed his mind...
...Prospects for U.S...
...They demanded a commitment to reverse the language of the 1984 Mexico City conference and make abortion a "fundamental human right...
...held a number of cards...
...The ambitious plan calls for a wide range of efforts directed at keeping population numbers under control, and also at fighting poverty and social injustice...
...The following March, he instructed all embassies in an "action cable" that "access to a safe abortion" was now "the priority issue for the U.S...
...conference builds upon and expands the one before...
...A summit of sixteen Latin American leaders discussed the ICPD, and fifteen of the presidents affirmed their governments' official pro-life policies...
...asked Tucci repeatedly of his captors...
...Ninety percent of the Draft Program had unanimous support...
...If U.S...
...funding have dimmed since the November elections...
...the precise number could not be determined because ICPD officials failed to provide journalists with a complete listing of delegates...
...Vice president Al Gore was to deliver a speech as the figurehead of the U.S...
...original congressional sponsors of a bill for American tax financing of ICPD's agenda are in retreat...
...On August 15, an interfaith group of Catholics, Protestants, evangelical Christians, Jews, and Moslems took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and other newspapers, stating that they were "deeply troubled" by the State Department's priorities...
...Countless complaints of vote-buying, and delegation-stuffing were heard, and conflict-of-interest allegations arose due to sponsors like Wyeth-Ayeurst, the firm whose logo appeared on the delegates' name-tagsand which, incidentally, manufactures the contraceptive Norplant...
...But in assuming that opposition to its agenda would come only from the Vatican and a few Islamic terrorist states, the Clinton administration grievously miscalculated...
...police, is now chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees U.N...
...A Bolivian delegate at the preparatory conference, according to several Latin American delegates, was unmasked as an impostor and was found not even to be a citizen of that country...
...They were detained for several hours, then brought to a hotel at the airport, from which they were to be deported the following morning...
...Fourth Women's Conference will be held in Peking from August 30 to September 15...
...In a June meeting with President Clinton, the pontiff reiterated his opposition on principled, not political grounds...
...Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J...
...government funds to international organizations that promote or perform abortions...
...It soon became apparent that the Holy See and about a dozen countries that refused to be intimidated would not grant consensus...
...The executive order paved the way for Planned Parenthood to receive $75 million from the Agency for International Development over a five-year period...
...17I 50 The American Spectator April 1995...
...1 n the end, most of the wording the Clinton administration had worked so hard to insert in the draft program was rejected...
...E ven the conference host, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said in his opening speech that his country's delegation would oppose anything against Islamic law...
...According to Elida Solorzano, head of the Nicaraguan delegation to the Cairo conference, Western elites "don't want any more dark people multiplying, we know that...
...We wrote the document...
...operations...
...The abortion battle was thus joined early, but Abzug's activists and the U.N...
...For new Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, the issue is not only political...
...The signers, ranging from Southern Baptist Convention president Jim Henry to former Peace Corps Director and Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver, also pointed out that only nine pages of the 113-page draft program were devoted to economic development, and faulted the ICPD's preparatory events for having "virtually ignored the great potential for family values, individual development, and scientific advances in the areas of health, nutrition, and agriculture to concentrate on the issues of population control...
...Tanzania's second-ranking health official, Mrs...
...But the conference organizers, led by officials from the United Nations and the international wing of Planned Parenthood and backed by corporate manufacturers of contraceptives, tried to strong-arm unwilling nations into adopting radical language about contraception and abortion...
...Clinton also created a new "global affairs" post at the State Department especially for Tim Wirth, who had just been defeated in a re-election bid to the Senate...
...You can't find antibiotics, but you can find condoms, pills, and IUDs...
...The pro-abortion lobby also had strong internal support...
...agencies in Peru...
...The next morning, after the intervention of Rep...
...Abzug and her Women's Caucus promise to be a fixture, and the Clinton administration appears to continue to stand with her activities...
...Agency for International Development (USAID) paid for their chosen delegates to represent them...
...Social Summit is scheduled to take place in Copenhagen from March 6-12, and the U.N...
...has officially denied her press credentials to report in Peking...
...Abzug, in fact, is already preparing for the follow-up to Cairo...
...She's now sort of a part of the United States government," enthused her aide Jessica Halem...
...Gore and Wirth announced at the outset that the United States never tried to coerce developing countries into adopting population controls, but the power plays were easy to see: Vice President Gore was shown with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announcing a trade deal, while the Egyptian population minister launched a diatribe against the Catholic Church...
...Not only did he communicate directly with leaders of predominantly Catholic countries, but he built bridges with Moslem leaders as well, prompting some in the administration and the press to say that the Pope was on his own jihad...
...Christopher Smith, who fought to prevent Keith Tucci's expulsion from Cairo after being handed over to U.N...
...The following afternoon, Tucci came upon the woman again, this time speaking with former senator Timothy Wirth, the U.S...
...All three were stripped of their conference passes...
...Its ostensible goal was to develop a Program of Action to institute guidelines for a $17 billion-a-year population-control program aimed at limiting world population at 7.8 billion by the year 2050...
...University of Maryland population scholar Julian L. Simon wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the U.N...
...with any violence...
...At the April preparatory conference, a group allied with the administration, Catholics for Free Choice, held a workshop called "How to Combat the Vatican...
...At least thirty-three directors and staffers also attended, bringing Planned Parenthood's Cairo contingent to more than 200 trained organizers and lobbyists, all with a huge financial stake in the outcome...
...USAID spent $500,000 to send 122 foreign participants...
...She's very close to Tim Wirth...
...agents seized them as well...
...Tucci, an ordained minister, had been granted ICPD press credentials to cover the nine-day event, but when a National Organization of Women (NOW) member recognized him in the conference center, she asked, "You're with Operation Rescue, aren't you...
...delegation, and in the weeks leading up to the conference, he misrepresented the administration's official position on the draft language by claiming, "The United States has not sought, does not seek and will not seek an international right to abortion...
...It unveiled a many-pronged strategy to oppose every issue that the Holy See supported, marginalize the Holy See diplomatically, strip it of its participation in U.N...
...to shape the draft by dominating the highly vocal Women's Caucus...
...Though virtually confined to a wheelchair by a massive swelling of her legs, Abzug, once an outspoken supporter of Stalin who remained active in promoting Communism through the 1960s and '70s, has lost none of her fire, as was visible in the administration's ICPD agenda, which had to be toned down in compromises proposed by Canada and the European Union...
...The Peking conference—opening three months after a new Chinese law goes into effect that forbids people with certain diseases or mental handicaps from marrying—is expected to legitimize the Chinese government's population control policies, which have been avidly endorsed by ICPD leaders...
...1 t was Bella Abzug that the Clinton administration rehabilitated to breathe life into the U.S...
...That is the commitment of our administration...
...Some of those countries were too poor to send their own envoys, so Planned Parenthood, U.N...
...The major force behind this faction was the Clinton administration...
...In a letter to Clinton, the Pope expressed additional objections that the draft program "almost completely overlooked [the] very complex issue of the relationship between population and development...
...In May, Wirth told an ICPD preparatory meeting, "The U.S...
...It was later learned that the Egyptians had received a tip from an unidentified American at the conference that Tucci was connected with the murders of two abortionists in Florida...
...Population Fund "carefully prevented mainstream population economists from participating...
...agencies, and the U.S...
...The U.N...
...Zakia Meghiji, who says she is open to the legalization of abortion, nonetheless adds, "In Tanzania, to talk about `safe abortions' is absurd...
...government believes the Cairo conference would be remiss if it did not develop recommendations and guidance with 48 The American Spectator April 1995 regard to abortion...
...They turned out to be employees of U.N...
...each U.N...
...Before the conference was half over, an American bureaucrat from the United Nations acknowledged to reporters that the ICPD chieftains would no longer seek consensus, but would settle for a lessthan-unanimous "general agreement...
...We do not even have safe childbirth...
...Said Halem before her boss departed for Cairo: "I think of her leading the battle against the Pope, and I think of how fortunate we are to have her...
...The Clinton administration and wealthy European countries threw their economic weight at smaller and poorer countries that opposed the population control measures aimed at them...
...At the same conference, delegates representing Peru sided The American Spectator April 1995 49 openly with the abortion faction, in direct defiance of the official position of their government...
...That October, Wirth cabled all American diplomatic posts around the world that the U.S...
...Under whose authority are we being held...
...Abzug's "we" was an elite group dominated by the United Nations Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), a New York–based feminist group co-chaired by Abzug, which works full-time to influence U.N...
...It's our language...
...Pope John Paul II personally led a strong diplomatic and spiritual campaign against the contested abortion language...
...In Copenhagen, a plan to recommend a "world tax" to finance the $17 billion-ayear ICPD population control program will be considered...
...Kenyan pediatrician Margaret Ologa declared, "We are running out of vaccine...
...You can go to our health centers...
...Tucci allowed that he was...
...This is our conference," she exhorted her followers aboard a shuttle bus to the conference in Cairo...
...While the administration took a pounding from the Vatican, it found its views isolated in the American hemisphere...
...delegation to the ICPD...
...By the final days of the ICPD, Wirth's aides were privately backing away from Bella Abzug, saying that she really wasn't that influential and that her role didn't amount to much...
...Our position is to support reproductive choice, including access to safe abortion...
...When two bystanders volunteered to accompany Tucci, U.N...
...Now Rep...
...The three prisoners were turned over to Egyptian authorities, who had been on a heightened terrorist alert...
...An FBI check on Tucci found no connection John Michael Waller is a writer in Washington...
...Ambassador Ned Walker had an emergency meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, who agreed to let the group remain in the country and re-join the conference...
...According to Planned Parenthood documents, the organization had its own individuals on the official government delegations of between twenty-six and fifty-eight countries...
...We put it together...
...They replied: "The United Nations...
...And we won't let it fail...
...Abzug, as Wirth's "private-sector" advisor on the U.S...
...state diplomacy had not pressured the developing countries, fewer than half the countries would have voted for the final document...
...The woman then poked her finger into his chest and snarled, "I'm getting you thrown out of here...
...Neither during nor after the crisis did he inquire about the Americans' safety, nor did he ever apologize, according to Tucci...
...Population Fund...
...The Holy See had only seventeen delegates...
...Wirth ducked the press until the end of the conference...
...We have no syringes, no needles, no sulfa drugs, no penicillin, yet our Family Welfare Centers never lack birth-control supplies...
...government delegation, worked simultaneously within the U.N...
...the Cabarrus County News, which Tucci represented in Cairo, is from Helms's own North Carolina...
...On his second day in office Clinton issued an executive order to repeal a standing ban on giving U.S...
...The Vatican was also concerned that the administration's focus on population control as a linchpin of development failed to consider such basic elements as freedom and economics...
...Damage control already has begun: according to a freelance reporter for the Southern Baptist Press who covered Cairo, the U.N...
...conferences and events to reflect its own brand of feminism...
...Clinton's sole ally in the group was Fidel Castro...
...The woman pointed Tucci out to Wirth, who summoned a bodyguard...
...She later showed up in Cairo as an employee of the U.N...
...undersecretary of state for global affairs, who had been a local Planned Parenthood board member in his native Colorado...
...The administration was hamstrung by two irreconcilable goals: a blanket endorsement of abortion and a consensus vote...
...Yet narrowing the scope of the ICPD to the point where it became little more than an abortion conference had been a preoccupation of the administration ever since January 1993...
...When a Tanzanian nun took the floor to rebut a statement by an American feminist that 30 to 40 percent of maternal deaths in Africa occur from "back alley" abortions, Abzug would not let her be heard...
...Guatemalan delegate Jose Garcia Bauer, longest-serving member of his country's congress, explained, "The U.S...
...Egyptian police, said Tucci, were "not only professional, they were extremely courteous and very kind...
...Tucci was turned over to United Nations security agents...
...would "stress" at the Cairo conference "family planning and related reproductive health services, including safe abortion...
...Once the conference began, it became clear that the United States delegation would attempt to steamroll over other nationsan effort that opened new foreign policy wounds with Africa, the Muslim world, and Latin America...
...He told reporters that the goal of making abortion "rare" was not only "the aim of the Catholic Church...
...S ince 1954, the United Nations has held its population and development conference every ten years, and last fall's 174-nation "abortion conference," as it became known, was the largest ever...
...government, at the ambassadorial level, pressured Central American countries to change their delegations to follow its policies...
...events, and ridicule the Pope and church representatives, according to National Institute of Womanhood President Cecilia Acevedo Royals, who attended the meeting...
...Just as important was who wasn't there...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
