Snag arises at meeting on women

UNITED NATIONS -- Ten years after a landmark UN conference adopted a platform aimed at global equality for women, the United States is demanding that a declaration issued by a follow-up meeting make clear that women are not guaranteed a right to abortion.

Starting today, a high-level United Nations meeting attended by more than 100 countries and 6,000 advocates for women's causes will be taking stock of what countries have done to implement the 150-page landmark platform of action adopted at the 1995 UN women's conference in Beijing to achieve equality of the sexes.

But Friday, even before the two-week meeting began, delegates were wrangling behind closed doors on a draft declaration that the UN Commission on the Status of Women put forward and had hoped to have adopted by today's opening session.

The short declaration would have nations reaffirm the Beijing platform and a declaration adopted with it, welcome progress toward achieving gender equality, stress that challenges remain, and ''pledge to undertake further action to ensure . . . full and accelerated implementation."

But at an informal closed-door meeting Thursday, the United States said it could not accept the declaration because of its concerns that the Beijing platform legalized abortion as a human right, according to several participants.

On Friday, the United States proposed an amendment to the draft declaration that would reaffirm the Beijing platform and declaration -- but only ''while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights and that they do not include the right to abortion," according to the text obtained by The Associated Press.

The Beijing platform calls for governments to end discrimination against women and close the gender gap in 12 critical areas, including health, education, employment, political participation, and human rights.

At the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo, delegates approved a platform recognizing that abortion is a fact that governments must deal with as a public health issue. At Beijing the following year, delegates reaffirmed this and went further, asking governments to review laws that punish women for having abortions.

But attempts to approve stronger language on access to abortions failed at Beijing, and references to sexual rights and sexual orientation were dropped. Nonetheless, the Beijing platform stated for the first time that women have the right to ''decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality . . . free of coercion, discrimination, and violence."

The Vatican and a handful of Islamic and Catholic countries opposed any reference to abortion at those conferences, while the West and hundreds of women's rights activists supported them -- including the US government under then-President Clinton.

But President Bush has taken a much tougher stand against abortion, as reflected in the proposed amendment.

''These amendments are consistent with US government views," said Richard Grenell, spokesman for the US Mission to the United Nations.

Some nongovernmental delegates to the meeting criticized the US position.

But Kyung-wha Kang, who chairs the Commission on the Status of Women, which is organizing the two-week meeting, refused to comment on the US amendment and urged all delegations ''to exercise as much flexibility and cooperation . . . so that in the end we can adopt language that all can agree to."