Feminists at the Cairo population conference

...Although this led to a drop in the total fertility rate (number of children per family) from 5.3 to 3.9, which is commendable progress, it is still far above UN goals...

...In other words, if a woman has a life of her own, she is satisfied to create just one or two more lives...

...The focus on women's issues created new political alliances, such as a coalition of the Vatican and conservative Muslim leaders demanding revisions of the conference's proposed final declaration to suit their teachings on human sexuality...

...18 • DISSENT...

...Second, tensions over population control that emerged between feminists and environmentalists at the Rio Summit have never been resolved...

...Ultimately, the Vatican accepted the final document...

...What does lower birthrates...

...As a result, Cairo had a larger number of NGO representatives in government delegations than any previous UN conference, and the NGOs had unparalleled access to official governmental delegations...

...Brandishing a Fatwa (religious edict) issued by al-Azhar, the renowned center for Islamic learning in Cairo, they asserted that although classical Muslim texts do not prescribe it, mutilation is legitimate because curbing the licentious behavior of women is indeed a goal of their religion, and physically removing sexual desire does just that...

...First, the American environmentalist groups in Cairo, such as the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, have consistently underplayed feminist issues...

...Parents who have their daughters circumcised are aware that they are eliminating sexual desire...

...In Cairo, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund included reproductive health on their agenda, but the mostly male speakers at their sessions did not engage with the feminist discourse of the conference...

...In Bucharest, Karan Singh, then India's family planning minister, coined a now famous slogan: "Development is the Best Contraceptive...

...Before Cairo, a growing coalition of wornen's rights groups, health workers, and social scientists attended preparatory meetings at which government delegates worked out the proposed UN document...

...as Gertrude Mongella, Secretary General of the UN Fourth World Conference on WINTER • 1995 • 15 Politics Abroad Women, scheduled for Beijing next year, stated in Cairo, "Women have become the third world of developing nations...

...At the Cairo conference, however, Egyptian physicians presented findings indicating that 91 percent of women living in Cairo had been subjected to clitoridectomies, and that an even higher number of rural Egyptian women had undergone the more severe infibulation...

...they tell investiWINTER • 1995 • 17 Politics Abroad gators that circumcised girls will not become licentious...

...Coercive pregnancies, genital mutilation, denial of the basic requirements of an independent life— such as education and property—are all questions of basic human rights...

...This practice, inaccurately termed female circumcision, has evoked controversy and rage at international conferences for two decades...

...The goal was a quick reduction in the worldwide population growth, which was then at about 2 percent per year, a rate that would have doubled the population in just thirty-five years...

...By the end of the conference, the Vatican was defeated and feminists prevailed...

...However, this has not led to significant lowering of birthrates...

...At Cairo, this was reformulated: unless a woman has a life of her own, her fertility will be out of control...

...If it is not motivated by religious law, why is it practiced...

...At the Earth Summit, feminists were angered by what they saw as demands by environmentalists for coercive family-planning programs in developing countries...

...Overpopulation, the conference declared, is an aspect of a larger problem: the maltreatment of women worldwide...

...From its outset, the modern feminist movement has argued that a woman cannot control her life if she cannot control her fertility...

...Representatives from southern hemisphere countries, in particular, complained that abortion debates distracted the conference from pressing social and economic issues...

...Such contentions simply reinforce the most important dimension of Cairo: the empowerment of women...

...Additional factors include misconceptions that Islam requires the practice and pressures of social conformity within the family and community...

...A World Health Organization (WHO) report issued in August says that 50 percent of Egyptian women have been mutilated, a total of nearly fourteen million, with infibulation (removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora, followed by suturing of the skin to close all but a tiny orifice) practiced in regions closer to Sudan, amputation of the clitoris elsewhere...

...In fact, Cairo marked a defeat for environmental activists, who—or so was my experience— were unable to link ecological to women's issues...

...Although the Sierra Club has made population control and reduction of consumption central to its agenda, it has not forged an alliance with women's rights activists who seek improved health services for women and who define reproductive rights as a human rights issue...

...For example, Amartya Sen compares India's Kerala province, which lowered its birth rate from 3.0 percent to 1.8 percent between 1979 and 1994, and China, which, during the same years, saw its rates decline from 2.8 percent to 2.0 percent...

...Now, for the first time, large numbers of African women themselves raised the issue...

...Unfortunately the environmental agenda established just two years ago at the UN Earth Summit in Rio was barely heard...

...Apart from the North African countries of Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, other regions of Africa show nearly universal mutilation, varying only on the extent of the amputation...

...The practice is found among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but is rooted in none of those religious traditions...

...Several Muslim representatives angrily declared that genital mutilation is in accord with Islam...

...In the past, when Western feminists denounced it, we were accused of ignoring indigenous cultural traditions and imposing Western ideology...

...Circumcision is called "tahara" in Arabic, meaning "pure" or "clean," and women who are uncircumcised are shunned as dirty...

...The cultural origins of female genital mutilation remain unclear...

...At the same time, although a substantial body of eco-feminist research has been published in recent years, including significant literature from southern hemisphere countries, feminist perspectives on environmental problems were absent from the Cairo discussions...

...Their studies indicate that mutilation is more widespread and severe than previously assumed...

...The first five days were virtually hijacked by the Vatican's demand for the elimination of the document's characterization of "unsafe abortion" as a "major public health concern...

...And as an Indonesian delegate said, the more that women demand their rights, the more they will be viewed not "as receptacles of birth control devices, but rather as agents of change...

...Clearly, the pontiff's representatives had realized that opposition to contraception in Cairo would have simply made the Church look foolish...

...Setback for Environmentalists The human rights language articulated in Cairo was drawn largely from the UN Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993...

...Similarly, the NGO women's rights discussion did not raise issues of environmental sexism...

...Abortion remained in the document, as did most of the other controversial language concerning contraception and the rights of "the family in all its forms...

...China, with its coercive one-child per-couple state policies, made dramatic progress, but only managed to lower birthrates from 2.8 percent in 1979 to 2 percent in 1991, and still is producing more people than any other country...

...Instead, they either concentrated 16 • DISSENT Politics Abroad on North American issues, such as the Waxman Bill to remove lead paint from urban dwellings, or discussed issues of eco-system deterioration that had no direct relevance to the main questions being debated...

...Whereas male circumcision involves removing a piece of skin, the mildest form of female genital mutilation, clitoridectomy, is roughly equivalent to amputation of the penis...

...The reports in Cairo also confirmed assumptions that genital mutilation is less frequently practiced among the children of urban women, who have education and jobs, thus linking its eradication to the same factors that promote lowered birth rates...

...The absurdity of a predominantly male conference determining international population policy led the UN to encourage increased participation of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), mostly women's rights groups, at Cairo and in the preparatory meetings...

...For example, in Egypt the use of contraceptives by couples rose from 24 percent in 1980 to 47 percent in 1992...

...Since women constitute only 3 percent of parliament members worldwide, their involvement as international governmental representatives is minuscule...

...By the fourth day of the conference, of the initial seventeen governments that had endorsed the Vatican's position on abortion, the only countries that remained supportive were Honduras, El Salvador Guatemala, Ecuador, and Malta...

...The environmentalists, who were primarily American-based, missed a valuable opportunity to show linkages between environmental degradation and impaired fertility, fetal malformation, diseases of pregnancy, infant mortality, and so forth...

...Although Egyptian activists made a strong case against mutilation at the conference, heated debate followed the showing of a film entitled Tahara, made by an Egyptian feminist...

...The effort during the past two decades to make available contraceptive devices in many of the most remote villages of the world has been quite successful...

...There never was a call for internationally legalized abortion, as the Vatican charged, but rather the demand that governments, in countries where abortion is legal, must ensure that they are performed without damaging the health of women...

...As a consequence, lectures they sponsored at the NGO Forum were poorly attended and seemed marginal to the conference...

...Rather, it results in lowered birth rates for the small minority who amass personal wealth...

...This was due to two factors...

...The success of Kerala—and of some regions of China—is due not to state coercion, but to social factors such as women's literacy (86 percent in Kerala, 68 percent overall in China), life expectancy, women's involvement in economic and political life, and securing rights such as inheritance...

...Unfortunately, crucial discussions of economic development were neglected at the ten-day meeting, and environmental concerns were almost thoroughly ignored...

...Worldwide, the WHO concludes that 114,296,900 women have been mutilated...

...Even more telling was the absence of any papal protest against contraception, which is equally taboo in Vatican theology...

...It is now evident, however, that because of unequal distribution of wealth, economic development in poorer countries does not necessarily lower the overall birth rate...

...The WHO reports that infibulation is found among 98 percent of women in Djibouti and Somalia and among 90 percent in Ethiopia...

...Slowing population growth will henceforth have to be addressed within the larger context of human rights for women...

...Studies published during the 1980s and 1990s indicate that even when contraception is readily accessible, the birthrate does not necessarily alter significantly...

...Cairo marked a welcome change in discussions of this practice...

...Muslims, emboldened by the Vatican, condemned the statement as a Western imperialist assault on the family, although Islamic teachings permit most forms of contraception and abortion to save the mother's life...

...In Rio, the Vatican assisted feminist groups in their effort to eliminate references to population control from the final text, Agenda 21...

...The first two UN meetings on population, held in Bucharest in 1974 and Mexico City in 1984, called for mass production and distribution of (mostly female) birth control devices...

...Economists and social scientists—together with feminists and women's health advocates—point to the crucial correlation between lower birthrates and education, economic independence, and basic political rights of women...

...The world rate is now 1.7 percent, but when applied to today's population, the result is an annual increase in absolute numbers that is larger than ever before...

...While the final document makes passing reference to environmental problems related to population growth, no concrete policies were formulated to address them...

...The NGOs pressed for a consensus around the idea that birthrates can be significantly lowered only in societies that grant women the right to education, economic independence, and decisions over reproduction...

...Nor does development necessarily improve women's lives...

...Mutilation of Women The most dramatic issue raised in Cairo concerned female genital mutilation, which was condemned in the final declaration...