From DEBRA@oln.comlink.apc.orgTue Aug 29 10:33:39 1995 Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 09:50:00 +0100 From: Debra Guzman Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org To: beijing95-l@netcom.com, beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org Subject: Nafis Sadik Beijing Perspective [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] ## author : theearthtime@igc.apc.org ## date : 26.08.95 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nafis Sadik Beijing Perspective By Nafis Sadik Earth Times News Service Despite barriers of inequity and discrimination, ordinary women all over the world are making unprecedented change in their own lives. Driven by pressing need and taking advantage of unprecedented opportunity, the world's women are showing their determination not to be denied better education, better health care, better jobs and equal treatment in the workplace and outside it. As a first step, they want the power to become pregnant only when they choose, and the right to bear their children in safety. For the past 20 years, the United Nations system has helped to speed the change by putting women's issues on the world's agenda. The great series of international conferences which culminates next month in China has set benchmarks on the environment, human rights, population, and social development--standards the world's governments are pledged to reach. Each step forward sets the pace of progress for all of us. In Beijing the Fourth World Conference for Women will bring together in one Platform for Action all these issues as they concern women. It is a great opportunity. Reaching consensus in Beijing will be based on the extended discussions at earlier conferences and at preparatory meetings. One of the clusters of issues still under discussion is of fundamental importance for the rest. Reproductive rights and reproductive health were debated intensively for three years, culminating in last year's International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. There, in the most publicized conference the United Nations has ever held on a social issue, 179 governments and thousands of nongovernmental organizations hammered out a historic agreement. The debate was intense and exhaustive, the results elating. For the first time, the nations came together and publicly committed themselves to a Programme of Action, declaring among other things that equity and equality for women is an end in itself. The conference set twenty-year goals for education, reproductive health care, and mortality. Specific goals were set for reducing maternal mortality, that hidden scourge of women's lives. At ICPD a diverse group of delegates from all countries, all cultures and all faiths pledged themselves to emphasize people and their needs rather than numbers. They agreed that women should join the mainstream in the fight against poverty and hunger; and they agreed that pregnancy by choice not chance is fundamental to that aim. Thousands of ordinary women were engaged in that debate. As a Western journalist commented, "Where else has the fundamental condition of all women, whatever their status or the state of their personal freedom been so intensely debated, or seen to be so relevant to the next century?" The consensus in Cairo was public, was universal and was solidly based on thorough and painstaking consultation and debate, taking into account all opinions, all values and all views. It is set out in clear and unambiguous language commanding universal support. It is if great importance that the Cairo consensus on reproductive rights and reproductive health be allowed to stand as part of the Beijing Platform for Action. It is the fruit of 25 years of practical experience; it is fundamental to women's empowerment: not to endorse it would call into question the whole process by which the nations reach agreement, and by which progress is made. The United Nations process is often criticized for moving in tiny steps rather than great leap--but with so many and such varied participants involved, real progress must always be measured incrementally. We only have to think of the difficulty of reaching agreement within our own families to understand the problems of finding common ground among the family of nations. When the dust cleared after Cairo, it was obvious to all that the way in which we approach global population problems had changed forever. It was real progress, because it brought closer real solutions for all those millions of ordinary women across the world. With much good will and more hard work, Beijing can build on the progress made at Cairo. It is my most earnest wish that we succeed.