U.N. Forum on Children Takes Up Abortion

UNITED NATIONS — UNITED NATIONS -- More than 60 world leaders and 6,000 other delegates gathered here Wednesday for a three-day meeting on children’s issues ranging from primary education funding to infant AIDS prevention and child labor abuses.

Yet the main issue preoccupying the gathering is reproductive health services for adolescent girls--not because of its inherent importance, but because the United States and a few predominantly Roman Catholic and Muslim allies are pressing for the elimination from conference documents of any direct or indirect endorsement of abortion counseling.

And, in a related position not widely shared here, U.S. officials say the final conference declaration should promote sexual abstinence as the best defense against disease and unwanted pregnancies for the world’s adolescents.

“As President Bush has said, abstinence is the only sure way of avoiding sexually transmitted disease, premature pregnancy and the social and personal difficulties attendant to nonmarital sexual activity,” Tommy G. Thompson, the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, told the delegates.

The official assignment of the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on Children is to review accomplishments and failures in the field of children’s rights and health since the last international meeting on the issue, in 1990.

Delegates agree that major achievements have been made in the last decade, especially in health: Polio has been nearly eradicated, childhood deaths from diarrhea in impoverished nations have been dramatically reduced, and more children are being educated than ever before, U.N. agencies report.

But the United Nations also reports that 10 million children die each year from preventable illnesses and that an estimated 150 million of the more than 2 billion children in the world are severely malnourished. The AIDS pandemic has left millions of children infected and an estimated 13 million orphaned--12 million of them in Africa, according to the United Nations.

At the 1990 children’s conference, wealthy nations promised to increase foreign aid contributions to impoverished countries, and the impoverished countries pledged to increase the share of their budgets devoted to basic health and education services for the young. Neither goal has been met, U.N. officials said. By insisting that references to reproductive health services for adolescent girls be included in the document that the conference is expected to adopt Friday, abortion rights advocates and adolescent health specialists have diverted attention from other, more significant children’s issues, such as education, U.S. officials charged.

“A document on children should not be focused on abortion and things like that. It should be focused on positive things,” Michael J. Dennis, a State Department human rights advisor in the U.S. delegation, told reporters.

The Bush administration wants the United Nations to condemn child prostitution and child pornography in much stronger terms than it has in the past, U.S. officials said.

It also is urging forceful action against the deployment of adolescents in armed combat. Administration officials say there is resistance to a U.S. proposal for a worldwide crackdown on the use of soldiers under age 18 by “non-state” forces--that is, rebel or guerrilla movements--but not by uniformed national armies.

But critics counter that the U.S. delegation itself has spotlighted the issue of reproductive health services, thus obscuring other important children’s issues in which the United States enjoys broader international support for its views.

In his speech Wednesday, Thompson indicated that concerns about birth control and abortion counseling were a priority for the Bush administration, both in its domestic programs and at the U.N. conference.

“Our efforts include strengthening close parent-child relationships, encouraging the delay of sexual activity and supporting abstinence education programs,” Thompson said before detailing other U.S. goals for the conference.

The very phrase “reproductive health services” has become an object of contention here, with the U.S. government urging that the word “services” be replaced by the word “care” or some other word that they believe would not imply medical intervention after a pregnancy. As an alternative, U.S. officials suggest, the phrase could be footnoted with a statement indicating that “services” should not be interpreted to include abortions or abortion counseling.

But even critics of the U.S. policy here acknowledge that abortion rights are, in fact, implicitly supported in the proposed U.N. texts being debated.

“Abortion is legal in more than a hundred countries, including the United States,” Tim Wirth, a former Democratic senator and Clinton administration official, said Wednesday. For the last decade, Wirth noted, resolutions adopted at U.N. conferences have used the phrase “reproductive health services” to include “safe abortion in those countries where it is not against the law, and the complications of unsafe abortion everywhere else.”

As speaker after speaker made clear, most U.N. members--from the wealthiest nations of northern Europe to the poorest countries of southern Africa--favor the aggressive promotion of birth control advice and devices as the best ways to combat AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

The U.S. stance has received strong backing from the Vatican and several Islamic countries that are rarely allied with Washington, among them Iraq and Iran.

But in striking contrast to past U.N. conference disputes over abortion and birth control, most nations with a majority Catholic population are no longer supporting the Vatican. Spain, speaking for the European Union, called Wednesday for comprehensive reproductive health services and “high-quality sexual education” for children. Latin American countries have expressed similar views.

Among Thompson’s advisors at the U.N. gathering is John M. Klink, an anti-abortion activist who has served as a lay Vatican representative at U.N. meetings on women’s health and population issues. Klink was once expected to be a leader of the U.S. delegation here, but his planned appointment as head of the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was withdrawn by the Bush administration in the face of Senate resistance.

Klink’s advisory role here was seen by U.S. abortion rights activists as a signal that the administration planned to take a hard-line position on the issue. But Wade F. Horn, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the U.S. delegation hopes to reach a compromise on a document that could be adopted by consensus.

“I’m a Presbyterian,” Horn said when asked whether U.S. policy was being dictated by the fundamentalist right. “That is about as moderate as you can get.”