c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Some 500 Kuwaitis demonstrated in front of that nation’s parliament on Monday (March 7) to demand the right to vote for women.

At the same time, halfway around the world, at the United Nations in New York, representatives of 130 nations, along with some 6,000 activists, continued a meeting to update a similar historic gathering 10 years earlier. In New York, women assessed how far nations _ including Kuwait _ had come in efforts to dismantle obstacles to women’s equality.

The assessment was less than rosy and the meeting became tense when the United States tried to assert that abortion is not a human right.

“A woman cannot vote in Kuwait. She cannot drive in Saudi Arabia. She is barred from working on military submarines in Britain, and she is not allowed to work at night in Bolivia except as a nurse or public servant,” Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep said in releasing a report by Equality Now at the U.N. meeting. Streep sits on the board of the the international human rights group.

The U.N. meeting, which ends Friday (March 11), marked the 10th anniversary of the landmark 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. At that meeting, the 189 nations attending adopted a statement pledging to revoke discriminatory laws against women and set 2005 as the deadline.

According to Equality Now, one of the main nongovernmental organizations at the New York meeting, 32 of 45 countries it studied had failed to repeal or amend discrimination laws that they had promised to revise.

Religious groups, including the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, were also playing a key role at the two-week meeting.

“Churches must stand firm with women and advocate for women’s human rights in all areas of life,” the WCC said in a statement released for the conference.

“In particular, churches are called upon to be more outspoken on gender-based violence, economic justice, HIV/AIDS, war and conflicts,” the WCC said.

Those issues were nearly overshadowed, however, as the United States, joined by the Vatican, used the first week of the two-week conference to press for an amendment to the meeting’s final document declaring that abortion is not a human right.

Although U.S. law, since 1973, has recognized that a woman’s right to abortion is protected by the Constitution, Republican administrations have repeatedly resisted linking abortion to family planning or in recognizing it as a human right.

At Beijing 10 years ago, the final declaration affirmed the “right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility” and sought to treat abortion as a public health issue.

It said that abortion should be safe where it is legal and women should not be punished for having one. The declaration left legal decisions about the procedure up to each country.

At the New York meeting, however, the United States sought to make clear that the United Nations should not endorse abortion as a human right.

“There is no fundamental right to abortion,” U.S. envoy Ellen Sauerbrey told the conference.

The U.S. hard-line stance alienated most other nations at the meeting, including some who are sometimes allied with the United States on abortion and family planning issues.

The United States argued that nongovernmental organizations it would not name are trying to hijack the ambiguous term “reproductive health services” and demanded that the New York meeting say specifically that the Beijing agreement does not include “the right to abortion.”

When that proposal was rejected, the United States, in a closed-door meeting on March 3, sought to change the proposed New York declaration to say that documents from the Beijing meeting “create no international human rights.”

Officials from countries attending the closed-door session said the U.S. stance was unanimously rejected.

“We don’t want any change in the Beijing declaration,” Nilcea Freire, Brazil’s minister of state for women’s affairs, told reporters.

Opponents of the U.S. position said it undermined efforts that needed to be made on other issues affecting women.

“It’s a very destructive distraction,” Gladys Mutukwa of the Women, Law and Deveopment Africa organization, told The New York Times. “The right to abortion is just one aspect of reproductive rights for women, so just to keep on one aspect is not productive and it does not have support.”

The United States, in dropping the effort, first said other nations were too intimidated by NGOs to back the U.S. position but then said so many nations agreed with them the amendment wasn’t necessary.

“We are hearing from many delegations that they agree with us and they advise us that the amendment is therefore not needed,” said Richard Grenell, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, Reuters reported.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

After the United States dropped its abortion initiative, delegates moved quickly to adopt a declaration reaffirming the Beijing blueprint as a means of promoting and protecting the rights of women and girls.

The declaration calls on nations to address the plight of women in a laundry list of areas, including poverty, education, health, violence and armed conflicts.

And as the conference wound down, delegates also marked International Women’s Day on Tuesday (March 8) considering what Secretary General Kofi Annan called “new challenges” that were less visible at Beijing _ the “odious but increasingly common practice” of the trafficking of women and the “terrifying growth of HIV/AIDS among women, especially young women.”

Annan’s message was echoed by the churches.

“In this time of heightened insecurity of war and conflicts, rape and sexual violence has increasingly become a tactic of war,” the WCC said in its statement.

“Women are especially vulnerable as their bodies become a means for demoralizing and destroying women, their families and communities, it said. “Let us pray for healing and transformation where women and men can live in true partnership with mutual respect and love.”

MO/JL DEA END RNS