Latin American States Proposing Radical Reproductive Rights at Beijing+5

By Austin Ruse | 2000

     (NEW YORK – C-FAM)  Beijing+5 negotiations resumed this week at UN headquarters in New York City. The final preparatory committee meeting which ended March 17 failed to produce an agreed upon document so negotiators have met sporadically over the past weeks trying in vain to reach an accord. These "intersessionals" are supposed to produce a text by next Friday just in time for the Special Session of the General Assembly which is expected to draw thousands of radical feminists from all over the world.

     Beijing+5 is the five-year review of the very contentious Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995). Dozens of countries disagreed with significant parts of the Beijing Platform for Action and submitted "reservations" or "interpretive statements." This new meeting is attempting to review the progress of national implementation of the "Platform for Action" and to find agreement on a new and some believe an even more radical document.

     Of particular concern for pro-family forces is the radical departure many Latin American states have taken from their conservative traditions. The pro-family coalition at the UN has relied upon several Latin American countries in recent years, but elections last year in Guatemala and Argentina have taken a toll on the coalition. In recent days, a group of delegations from mostly pro-life Catholic countries have advanced language that seems to contradict their own cultures.

     The coalition, which includes Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, and Venezuela, is attempting to place the term "sexual rights" into the document. "Sexual rights" is an undefined term that first appeared at the original Beijing conference, where more than 60 countries objected to it. Pro-family delegations argue that "sexual rights" is an attempt to include the "right to act out openly on sexual impulses inside or outside marriage, including deviant sexual impulses such as homosexuality."

     The radical Latin American coalition also wants to include a "rights based approach" to health and health care for women and girls. A "rights based approach" generally means the reinterpretation of existing human rights instruments to include abortion and homosexual behavior. This is a surprising approach coming from Catholic Latin America where abortion is illegal in all countries.

     Another controversy is brewing with the presence of an NGO journalist in private state meetings. Jyoti Singh, a population columnist for the pro-population control UN newspaper Earth Times, has been assigned as a "facilitator" of the Beijing meetings by Nitin Desai, Undersecretary General for the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. A former high ranking official in the UN Population Fund who worked directly for the ideologically pro-abortion Nafis Sadik, Singh attends meetings of delegations including the most private meetings of the "Bureau," a small group of states that run the conference. Singh also has monitored the highly controversial "health" negotiations. Some delegations fear Singh will bring his own population control agenda to the negotiations and report upon them later.

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