c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Christine Gudorf is Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University. She is a regular contributor to the RNS”Voices of Women in Religion”series.)

UNDATED _ Last week (Feb 8-13) in the Netherlands, the United Nations held the first of three meetings to review progress toward implementing the goals agreed upon at the 1994 United Nations population and development conference in Cairo, Egypt.

The most prominent attendee at the Hague follow-up conference was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had much to say about how the Cairo agenda is a boon to women’s lives and health.

Yet it remains that in much of the world women are not yet the primary controllers of their own bodies. Women in many nations still see coercive reproductive practices imposed on them, usually through sterilization, occasionally from abortion, and in some countries through the denial of contraceptive devices. The objectification of women as wombs is not a relic of the past, but remains very much with us.

A few weeks ago Population Action International, a Washington-based think tank, released figures showing that most nations who pledged funding for the population and development agenda agreed upon at the Cairo conference have not followed through. Only $1.4 billion of the pledged $5.7 billion has been received to date.

The biggest unpaid amounts belong to the United States and Japan. While Japan’s economic problems may entitle it to a delay, given the debate in the United States over what to do with our huge budget surplus, we have no excuses.

Funding the Cairo agenda is critical for women because for the first time there was general agreement that women count, that the most morally acceptable, as well as the most effective, method of reducing world population was not coercion or direct pressure of any kind, but by providing the conditions under which women and their families choose to have fewer children.

There was vigorous religious debate at Cairo, though members of the same religion were frequently found on both sides of the debate. Religion can and has been used both to maintain women’s”traditional”status as mere wombs, and to ground accounts of women as free moral agents who make their own reproductive decisions.

An overwhelming amount of research has demonstrated that women have fewer children when infant and child mortality is reduced, when families have access to clean water, when education levels for women rise and women have access to credit that allows them to make economic contributions to their family.

That is, women and their families choose to have fewer children when alternative uses of their energy and time improves family welfare. When the lives of children are insecure, women and their partners will have more children in attempts to ensure surviving children and old-age security.

The non-governmental organization forum at Cairo featured innumerable speakers from grassroots clinics who denounced population control programs funded from developed nations.”We have,”they said,”closets full of injectable and implantable contraceptives, IUDs and condoms. Women come to us with babies dying of diarrheal dehydration from bad water, with husbands with infected cuts, with malnourished toddlers dying of measles. We should offer them condoms for these problems? We have no aspirin, no rehydration salts, no antibiotics. Often we have no inoculations. Your contraceptives are of no use to us until these basic needs are met.” They also correctly pointed out that for us in the developed world to push population reduction on poor nations in the name of environmentalism is the pot calling the kettle black. For a child in the United States has between 10 and 200 times the environmental impact of a child in a poor nation. Our childbearing is far more detrimental to the survival of the earth than that of any Nigerian mother of 10.

The welfare of women around the world _ and of the daughters and granddaughters of us all _ depends in vital ways upon funding the full development agenda, not just the contraceptive provisions.

But pressure to support these development goals needs to go beyond the Congress and the Clinton administration. We need to ensure that our churches and synagogues and mosques not only preach respect for the moral agency of women, but that they teach that a woman’s moral agency regarding her body’s reproduction is grounded in the dignity of the human person proclaimed in divine revelation.

Hard times are ahead, and women will need the support of religion. Let us hope that we have passed the point when, as they have in the past, religions debate whether women have souls, can be saved, are capable of moral decision-making, or represent the image and likeness of God.

DEA END GUDORF