World Views and the Struggle Over World Population Control
- May 1, 1995 - comment
Their rock is not like our Rock, as even our enemies concede. Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are filled with poison, and their clusters with bitterness. Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras. Deuteronomy 32:31-33
Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:21-22
Introduction
Moral war between clashing world views is not a new phenomenon. The passages of Scripture quoted at the beginning of this article—one from the Old Testament and one from the New—serve to demonstrate an important truth: that moral battles arising from competing ethical paradigms have been a peculiar feature of human experience for a long time. Of course, moral struggles sometimes have to do with whether we are living up to norms that are uncontested in theory if not in practice. But a deeper, more volatile sort of moral battle arises where opposing world views vie against one another for control over some critical prize, be it the soul of one man, the soul of a civilization, or the agenda of an international body such as the United Nations (UN).
Where moral battle involves clashing world views, champions on opposing sides face each other convinced that what their opposition takes for “grapes” are in fact “deadly poison” and “bitterness,” that what seems wise to the other side is mere “foolishness,” and that what looks like “illumination” and “light” according to the opposed ethical paradigm is in fact spiritual and moral “darkness.” Thus, competition is both volatile and fierce precisely because judgments about good and evil, righteousness and wickedness, wisdom and foolishness, are mutually exclusive. The stakes are high because they involve the nature of morality itself, and there can be no middle ground. If one side is right, the other side is dangerously wrong—however well intentioned their views and commitments.
This sort of moral competition was clearly evident at the 1994 UN population conference held at Cairo, September 5-13. Despite efforts of the secular media to explain the international fireworks of the Cairo conference in political, social or economic terms, the battle lines that most shaped conference debates had almost nothing to do with regional political or economic differences and everything to do with clashing religiously determined moral convictions over the sanctity of human life, the relationship between marriage and sexual behavior, the responsibilities of men and women, the meaning of family, and the value of children.
Background
The Cairo meeting was the third international conference in as many decades held by the UN to work on issues surrounding global population growth. The first population conference was held in 1974 at Bucharest, and was followed ten years later in 1984 by a second conference at Mexico City. The planning of both previous conferences was shaped by advocates of a theory that sees the world moving rapidly toward a crisis caused by over population. This is the view that an expanding human population will soon outstrip all available resources, impoverishing the human race and sending the globe into panic and disorder leading to catastrophic destruction. By this view people are a problem, human population is either a “pollutant” or a “malignancy,” and reproduction is a danger to be captured and controlled. But while the advocates of population control had set the agenda at both previous conferences, stiff resistance had left them with little to show. They found that their assumptions were not widely shared, and their analyses were severely challenged in scientific as well as cultural terms. Except for a few voices from countries in Northern Europe and North America, most saw the relation between population growth and economic development as infinitely more complex than was represented by population doomsayers, and rejected the prospect of governmentally enforced programs of fertility regulation as something that was either unnecessary, or inimical to essential moral and cultural commitments, or both.
The disappointment suffered by the population controllers was especially egregious at Mexico City, which happened to fall during the Reagan Administration. At Mexico City, UN population planners, together with nongovernment activists tried to secure UN-funded abortion as the central means for controlling world wide fertility levels. But their effort was categorically rejected. Not only did the Mexico City conferees fail to give UN sanction for abortion-ondemand, they adopted a final report that explicitly rejected abortion as a morally legitimate means of family planning and population control. Using this policy as justification, the US government through the Reagan and Bush Administrations withheld support from the United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA) which had been and continued to be the chief financier of abortion services at the international level.
Following their defeat at Mexico City, population controllers at the UN and among its nongovernmental affiliates determined to make the next population conference a different matter. Cairo would not only reverse the setback suffered in 1984, but would go beyond their original Mexico City goals by setting forth an even more aggressive agenda for controlling human population worldwide. This time not only would they seek to limit fertility levels, they would also seek to reconstruct social and moral relationships worldwide by broadening the definition of “family,” and by appeal to positive concepts such as empowerment, equity and emancipation. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 fired their enthusiasm, for it seemed to guarantee their success.
Initial planning for the Cairo conference was clearly dominated by population controllers on the ideological left. Although the Cairo conference preparatory committee held several meetings that supposedly took input from all UN member delegations and from officially recognized nongovernmental affiliates, this was not the case. While representatives from organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Guttmacher Institute, the Audubon Society’s population program, Catholics for a Free Choice, and staff members from major funders of population activism were given prominent place at the preparatory meetings, representatives of UN affiliates who were not in line with the approved ideology were either excluded or relegated to the periphery. This prejudice extended to the treatment of UN delegates themselves and came to a head when, during the third preparatory meeting held in New York, the meeting chair strongly reproved the Vatican delegation for presuming to raise moral objections to the proposed conference agenda. As a consequence, it was no surprise when the draft programme produced by the conference preparatory committee forwarded a radical agenda for social, cultural and moral reconstruction on a global scale.
Moral Stakes
While the draft programme couched its agenda in a series of seemingly innocuous terms such as “empowerment,” “reproductive health care,” “safe motherhood,” “gender equity,” and “fertility regulation,” these were only a positive gloss for a concerted effort to impose, through UN programming, a radical new moral perspective. This new perspective touching norms relating to marriage, family and sex was wholly contrary to ethical traditions held sacred by most people and taught by most religions despite their obvious differences in matters of theology and culture.
At its core, the new moral framework that was embedded in the draft programme took aim at the sanctity of human life. As tried in their failed Mexico City effort ten years earlier, the planners of the Cairo conference intended to make UN-funded abortion the central means for controlling world wide fertility. Although it was not stated in so many words, the abortion agenda was clearly forwarded under terms such as “reproductive services,” “reproductive rights,” “reproductive choice,” and “fertility regulation.” The true abortion agenda was exposed early in the drafting process as every effort to repeat the Mexico City policy rejecting abortion as a method of family planning was firmly rebuffed. But, if there was ever any doubt concerning the presence of an abortion agenda for Cairo, it was erased by a cable sent in March 1994 by the Clinton Administration State Department which at the time was playing the dominant role in drafting the Cairo programme. The cable sent to all U.S. diplomatic missions overseas emphasized that the Administration was seeking to ensure UN recognition of an international “right to abortion,” and was making this the primary goal of the Cairo conference. It stated “the U.S. believes that access to safe, legal, and voluntary abortion is a fundamental right of all women,” and U.S. foreign service personnel were ordered do all they could to convince the delegates of other nations heading for Cairo of the need to get “stronger language on the importance” of “abortion services.”
But the sanctity of human life was not the only critical moral matter at stake in the draft programme prepared for Cairo. Also challenged was the value of childbearing and the importance of children themselves. Throughout the draft document, children were treated as a serious threat to adult welfare, to national economies, to international development, and to the global environment. Rather than viewing children as a blessing to be cherished and welcomed, the draft programme addressed children simply as a burden and a problem to be avoided. They were nowhere acknowledged either as having value in themselves or as a resource for future development. Children were consumers, new competition for a shrinking pool of natural resources, and were never treated as new producers able to multiply resource utility through work and able to discover new resources for the benefit of mankind. Those most alarmed by this feature in the draft programme were the purported beneficiaries of the UN population agenda in the Third World. These discovered that it was their children the draft programme was set to limit, and not so much the children of Northern Europe and America. To many living in other parts of the planet, international regulatory programs targeting their children had the look and feel of “cultural imperialism.” Some, failing to accept the moral vision of the Cairo planners, complained that the document appeared to secure the interests of advantaged elites living in developed countries by taking from them the one remaining resource on which they could rely for happiness and security—their own children. What seems a threat and a burden to State Department representatives, Planned Parenthood executives and UN administrators meeting in the economically comfortable and technologically complex surroundings of New York city is surely not considered that way by the populations they supposedly mean to benefit—the bedouins, tribesmen and peasant farmers of the Third World.
The draft programme included many other elements characteristic of the world view that first drove the sixties sexual revolution in the United States, and that is now challenging authority structures and norms traditionally considered essential for the stability and strength of families. Sexual activity by everyone regardless of marriage, and regardless of age, was assumed almost as an entitlement. Nowhere in the document was it hinted that sexual activity should ever be restrained by turning up the pressures of social disapproval or by promoting moral norms protecting the sexual integrity of marriage. Indeed the relevance of abstinence and self-discipline to sex outside of marriage was more noted by its absence than by its presence. Instead, any sexual behavior was treated as having moral standing equal to any other. The only “sin” to speak of was childbearing, and traditional religious, moral and cultural barriers protecting this “sin” were “problems” to be controlled, minimized, or if possible eliminated. Accordingly, the draft programme sought to sever the moral bond between adolescents and their parents by assuring “confidential access” to reproductive services. Thus the conference planners had government “fertility regulators” and “reproductive health care workers” preempting the role of parents in matters concerning the sexual activity of their own teenage children. In other words, the services of agency bureaucrats having no permanent personal interest in the lives of particular children, offering no scruples concerning the immorality of premarital sex, and having no long term interest in the formation of lasting marriages, were supposed to replace the loving discipline, moral instruction and lifelong personal commitment of parents precisely where and when it is needed most.
The family, too, came under attack in a section titled “The Family, Its Roles, Composition and Structure.” Here, after a passing reference to the family as “the basic unit of society,” the document proceeded to trivialize the importance of two-parent, heterosexual families and to affirm the moral legitimacy of “various concepts of family” and even to affirm the moral standing of homosexual couples within the meaning of “family” under the term “other unions.” Instead of affirming the two parent, heterosexual family as a universal ideal transcending time and culture, the draft programme took the opposite direction by treating this family structure as no more worthwhile, desirable or normal than a limitless number of other living arrangements. Thus, by stressing variety and preferring no particular structure to any other, the programme so trivialized the meaning of “family” as to render the term meaningless. If anything is a family, then nothing is a family.
Finally, it should be noted that the programme drafted for Cairo also sought to redefine male-female family roles on a transcultural, global scale. Not satisfied to permit religious or even cultural variation in the way peoples of the world workout the meaning of gender distinctions in family life, the drafters propounded a theory of “gender equity.” In doing so they meant to deny that gender should have any direct bearing on the role a man or woman takes in the processes of child-rearing and family leadership. The document charged governments to see that men are made to “share more equally . . . in domestic and child-rearing responsibilities.” By appealing to government agencies and suggesting observable standards of equal participation in domestic chores, the draft document not only tilted against transcultural and panreligious norms regarding male headship in the family, it also rejected the idea that it ought to be a husband’s role to take ultimate responsibility to ensure the provision, welfare, security, discipline, and stable future of their families.
Moral War
Given their control of the conference planning process, their success at excluding meaningful participation by ideological opponents during the preparatory stages, their drafting of a radical document for consideration at Cairo, and aggressive support from the Clinton Administration, the population controllers and international social engineers were confident of success at Cairo. But they had not reckoned with the religious depth of the moral offense their programme engendered, nor were they prepared to respond to the volatile nature of attacks made against religiously defined moral norms. In other words, they did not anticipate, nor were they ready to appreciate, the power of reactions that were roused by a war between fundamentally
opposed world views and mutually exclusive moral perspectives.
Between the final preconference planning meeting which took place in April 1994 and the Cairo conference in September 1994, a firestorm of religiously inspired moral criticism erupted that in the end produced a far different result than anything the population controllers expected. The resistance movement began with a series of public statements made by the Pope, who continued throughout the campaign to be the dominant voice calling for moral scrutiny and redirection of the population conference agenda. This set in motion a worldwide effort by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to alert national and religious leaders, especially in the Third World, concerning the moral stakes that would be involved at Cairo. In the United States, the Catholic effort took the form of a letter to President Clinton signed by all six U.S. cardinals as well as by the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops1. This was then supplemented by a series of increasingly sharp press releases designed to build public opposition against the Clinton Administration’s morally objectionable perspective on population. At the international level, the Vatican issued its own series of press releases critical of the Cairo draft document, and preceded to mounted a powerful diplomatic drive. The Catholic diplomatic effort produced a detailed statement explaining specific moral concerns that was distributed widely throughout the international diplomatic corps. Vatican representatives then worked to enlist support from other national delegations preparing to attend the Cairo conference.
Although the Pope and the Catholic Church began and remained the most powerful source of moral criticism, theirs was not the only religious voice, nor was moral opposition to the draft Cairo programme entirely a Catholic concern. Soon after the Catholics began their campaign, a number of other religious voices joined the effort to redirect the moral direction of the UN population conference. These included a chorus of Muslim voices calling for faithful adherence to traditional moral norms touching on sexual conduct, children, marriage and family relations. Although the Muslim world lacks the hierarchical simplicity and organizational strength of the Catholic Church, moral concerns raised by Muslim readings of the draft programme demonstrated an impressive consistency that mirrored concerns already identified by the Catholics. The most notable preconference statement of Muslim moral concerns was published by the Center for Islamic Research of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a 1,000 year old center of Islamic learning considered the most prestigious theological institution in the Muslim world2. Expressing clear moral convictions, the Al-Azhar statement cited chapter, section and paragraph in the Cairo draft programme found to conflict with the Koran, and called on Islamic delegations going to Cairo to accept no obligation contrary to their enduring duty to abided by the Islamic Sharia. This not only served to alert Muslim delegates to the moral stakes involved, but served also to (1) cement Muslim moral opinion, (2) focus Muslim political efforts, and (3) legitimize Muslim moral and political cooperation across religious lines in combating a common moral foe. In the United States the Al-Azhar statement led to the declaration of a joint Muslim and Roman Catholic statement critical of Cairo and carrying the moral authority of the American Muslim Council and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops3.
As the moral campaign to redirect Cairo grew through the summer of 1994, the Roman Catholic and Muslim duet soon became a full chorus of religious opposition. Although Catholics and Muslims were the only religions to have diplomatic standing to work on their own behalf in the process of building political alliances among delegates going to Cairo, other religious communities joined the campaign thus adding moral and spiritual weight to mounting international pressures against the permissive moral agenda of the conference planners. In the United States, eleven Evangelical leaders—including Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Billy Melvin of the National Association of Evangelicals, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, and Ed Young of the Southern Baptist Convention—sent their own letter of protest to White House, that repeated and reinforced the earlier effort of the Catholic Archbishops. In it they urged President Clinton “not to make the United States an exporter of violence and death.” Beyond this cooperative Evangelical effort, the Southern Baptist Convention, through the Christian Life Commission headed by Dr. Richard Land, added official denominational strength to expressions of Evangelical concern by making and publicizing an official theologically based statement of moral criticism of the Cairo draft programme. The Southern Baptist critique was followed by a press conference in Washington, D.C. and was covered by national newspapers because it was judged to threaten the moral credibility of the Clinton Administration. This threat had substance because both the President and Vice President had sought to claim moral legitimacy and respect for their moral sentiments due to membership at Southern Baptist churches. The Southern Baptists went so far as to participate in a Multi- Religious Consultation held in July 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. This multi-religious forum produced a statement later presented at Cairo that listed moral concerns with the draft programme found to be broadly shared by official representatives of major world religions including Buddhists, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Bahais, Hindus, Jewish (Orthodox), Roman Catholics and Baptists4.
By the time the Cairo conference convened in September 1994, the moral agenda of the conference planners was in serious jeopardy. The moral stakes were well known by even the most educationally challenged and politically disengaged Third World delegates. Any hope the planners had of slipping their moral agenda past clueless Third World diplomats unfamiliar with the secondary and tertiary meanings of their diplomatic argot had evaporated over the summer. This did not mean, however, that the conference planners led by Clinton appointees of the U.S. delegation were prepared to give up without a fight5. Nevertheless, after much conflicting ideological heat illuminated by very little media light, a bad document was made much less bad, and in some respects the final report even made ground favorable to traditional religious morality.
On the abortion issue, the final report issuing from Cairo restored the policy language of Mexico City by categorically affirming that “In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.” Thus the planners’ goal of achieving recognition of an international right to abortion on demand was positively thwarted. In addition, the phrase “marriage and other unions,” meant to give moral legitimacy to homosexual couples and to include homosexual unions within the definition and meaning of “families,” was dropped. Also, respect for the primacy of parental rights and responsibilities for the moral discipline of their minor children was restored by removing the drafters’ call for “confidential” delivery of reproductive services to adolescents.
Though surely a far different document than had been drafted, the final UN report on population policy was never made purely favorable to traditional religious morality, nor was the result a complete route for progressive purveyors of individual sexual autonomy, abortion on demand and family restructuring. Despite removal of the most egregious language touching abortion, parental responsibility and family structure, the final report remained deeply negative regarding the value of children, and remained closed to the creative and productive possibilities of future generations. Furthermore, despite abandoning its original insistence on severing adolescents from the moral scrutiny and discipline of parents, it nevertheless continued to urge government funding and promotion of programs to distribute “special family planning information” directly to minor children still under the tutelage of parents.
Lastly, the major moral war over abortion was not won without tossing a bone to placate the opponents of traditional religious morality. The last struggle before passage of the final report focused on phraseology of a sentence inserted immediately following the hard won statement rejecting abortion as a legitimate method of family planning. This second sentence stated that “In circumstances where abortion is legal, such abortion should be safe.” The Vatican delegation supported by a number of morally traditional governments remained firmly opposed to the notion of “safe” abortion. While these also wished to promote good medical care for women dealing with unwanted pregnancies, they were concerned that the language of “safe” abortion ignored the sanctity of life in the womb. Their moral objection on observed that no abortion is ever safe for the baby killed by the procedure. Although proponents of sexual license and abortion argued that the statement merely admitted legal reality, in the view of traditional religious morality the language of “safe” abortion amounted to saying that “in circumstances where murder is legal, murderers should do their work in a manner that poses the least possible risk to themselves.” This impasse was settled when negotiators changed the offending language to read “in circumstances where abortion is not against the law, such abortion should be safe.” The Vatican and its allies did not endorse the alteration, but they agreed finally not to object on grounds that the change from “legal” to “not against the law” suggested the possibility of legal reform and did not imply the moral validity of laws protecting broad access to abortion services.
Analysis
What lessons can we learn from the 1994 Cairo population conference regarding policy battles involving clashing world views and fundamentally opposed ethical paradigms? First, I would offer that we must develop a clear understanding of the nature and depth of this sort of moral engagement. If we fail to achieve sufficient appreciation for the depth, power and contrast involved in such confrontations, participants will not only risk being ineffective, but will likely fail to appreciate the significance of the moral stakes connected to results emerging from their engagement. Well-meaning participants who do not understand clashing ethical paradigms will surely be taken advantage of by opponents who do. Furthermore, they will likely give ground on matters that seem innocuous or peripheral if judged in terms of a common moral perspective but that in fact harbor profound stakes because they grant legitimacy to opposing and incompatible ethical points of view. As an example, we should remember the significance of phrases from the draft Cairo programme such as “diversity of family composition,” “marriage and other unions,” and “the plurality of family forms.” Within a common moral paradigm these seem only to recognize the difference between families with children as compared to families without, and between two parent families as compared to a widowed mother struggling to raise her children alone. Where moral paradigms clash, however, such phrases grant the legitimacy of having children without the benefit of marriage, homosexual unions, threesomes, group marriage, and adult-child sexual partnerships.
Second, we need to realize that where moral conflict involves clashing ethical paradigms, the struggle rarely if ever offers shared ground on which to construct an acceptable compromise. Where the struggle is characterized by diametrically opposed and mutually incompatible solutions, the value and justification of which depend on competing frameworks of moral judgment, both cannot be right. There simply is no common concept of moral good because the “good” defined by one paradigm is “evil” by the other, and vice versa. At Cairo, the agenda orchestrated by International Planned Parenthood and the Clinton Administration was seen from traditional religious moral perspectives as “wicked,” “corrupt,” and “imperialistic,” even while its proponents conceived their agenda as a moral crusade and were thoroughly convinced that traditional religious perspectives were “regressive,” “criminal,” and “immoral.” If one moral paradigm is right, then others are dangerously wrong no matter how sincerely they may be held by proponents. The deeply divisive moral issues surfaced by the struggle over world population policy at Cairo were not settled by the discovery of common ground or the acceptance of mutually acceptable norms. Rather, the outcome was dependant upon strength of moral convictions, firmness in negotiating posture, shrewdness in addressing media coverage, and willingness and skill at building political strength through moral alliances formed across cultural and religious lines.
The third lesson we can learn from Cairo about winning battles involving clashing world views has to do with the importance of selecting short-term allies appropriate to the battle at hand. The Cairo experience demonstrated that most of the world’s traditional faith communities (Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Bahais, and even indigenous tribal religions) share at their core a common ethical perspective that reverences the sanctity of human life, celebrates the blessing of children, honors heterosexual marriage, rejects homosexuality, respects parental responsibility for the care and discipline of minor children, rejects sexual license and extra-marital sexual adventurism, and believes in the primacy of male responsibility in the family. As advocates of a relativistic, voluntaristic, libertarian and licentious ethical paradigm move to reshape the morality of existing policies and to erect new policies meant to limit the relevance of traditional norms, it is essential that we understand the strategic importance of crossing traditional religious lines to form political alliances in moral wars. Such alliances are formed only on the level of commonly held moral commitments. They are matters of political strategy that do not require changes of spiritual conviction, and do not minimize the significance of standing theological differences.
At Cairo, the moral direction of the conference shifted when Catholics, Muslims and Evangelicals determined to combine political power to defend common moral convictions. Despite continuing deep and fundamental disagreements on matters such as God, sin and salvation, religions sharing a traditional moral perspective now find themselves facing a common opponent intent upon establishing a wholly contrary ethical paradigm. In such a conflict—where the ethical stakes cannot be exaggerated, where there is no common moral ground, and where if one moral paradigm offers nourishing “grapes” then the other is offering “deadly poison”—moral alliances across traditional religious lines are not only possible. They are politically, morally and spiritually mandatory.
Footnotes
1 These 6 cardinals were: Hickey of Washington, Bernardin of Chicago, Law of Boston, O’Connor of New York, Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, Mahony of Los Angeles. The president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was Archbishop William Keeler of Baltimore.
2 The Center for Islamic Research of Al-Azhar is headed by Sheikh Gad El Haq Aly Gad El-Haq Sheikh Al-Azhar.
3 The authorities behind the joint Muslim and Roman Catholic statement were Dr. Mohammed Aslam Cheema, president of the American Muslim Council, and Archbishop William H. Keeler, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
4 I was designated by the Christian Life Commission [now the Ethic’s & Religius Liberty Commission] to represent the Southern Baptist Convention at this multi-religious consultation. I also represented Baptist Christian moral concerns at the NGO Forum portion of the Cairo population conference.
5 The United States delegation was led by Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth, a zealous advocate for increased U.S. support for international abortion programs and distribution of condoms in the Third World. Mr. Wirth is known for keeping a jar of condoms on display in his State Department office. Nongovernment members appointed to the U.S. delegation by the Clinton Administration included Jeanne Rosoff, president of the Guttmacher Institute.
Dr. Daniel R. Heimbach
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina 27588
Prepared for delivery at the 28th Annual Seminar of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, Wake Forest, North Carolina, February 27–March 1, 1995
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