U.N. Speaks Softly About Youth Sex

UNITED NATIONS —  The United States, the Vatican and a few conservative Islamic allies forced last-minute changes in a declaration adopted at the close of a three-day U.N. meeting on children’s issues Friday, including the removal of what they perceived to be indirect references to abortion counseling for adolescents.

The Bush administration failed to get the United Nations to endorse sexual abstinence as the best way to prevent sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy among teenagers. But it succeeded in deleting strong endorsements of sex education programs that had been supported by a large majority of the 181 nations participating in the meeting.

Titled “A World Fit for Children,” the 26-page conference document outlines 21 commitments to improve children’s health and education and eradicate child prostitution, child labor and the recruitment of children for combat.

“Look, it wasn’t always easy, but the governments of the world got where they had to get,” said Carol Bellamy, director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, which sponsored the meeting.

By tradition, U.N. conference statements are adopted by acclamation, though member states can append their “reservations” regarding specific passages to the final document. But U.S. delegates had threatened to scuttle the entire declaration unless it reflected the Bush administration’s staunch opposition to abortion.

The administration also succeeded in watering down references to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was endorsed without dissent by the General Assembly in 1989 and has now been ratified by every U.N. member except Somalia and the United States, where some conservative groups consider it an infringement on parental authority.

“Much of the document is very positive, but in regards to reproductive health and children’s rights the language is exceedingly weak, and this is due entirely to U.S. pressure,” said Adrienne Germain, the president of the International Women’s Health Coalition. The U.S. position ultimately prevailed, Germain and some African and Latin American delegates here said, because of concerns by poor nations and international charities that defiance of Washington could trigger cuts in critical U.S. financial support.

European governments, already at odds with the White House over issues ranging from global warming to Saddam Hussein, tried to keep the children’s forum from turning into another battleground over policy differences with the United States. In an effort to reach compromise, the European Union dropped its earlier insistence on an unequivocal condemnation of capital punishment for minors, which is permitted in some U.S. states.

Among the countries balking at both the U.S. demands and the proposed European compromise were Canada, Norway, Japan and--more surprisingly--Latin American nations, which once were aligned with the Vatican in birth control and sex education disputes at U.N. conferences.

Caught in the middle was UNICEF and Bellamy, its director, one of the few Americans in the U.N.’s top echelon. Some leaders of children’s rights and women’s health groups criticized UNICEF for sidestepping the dispute on abortion and birth-control counseling.

Bellamy stressed what she saw as the many positive achievements of the conference. For the first time, she noted, a U.N. meeting on children’s issues included substantial representation from children themselves: More than 200 youth delegates participated in planning and debates, often offering blunt criticism of their elders.

Health groups unveiled initiatives here to fight malnutrition and dehydration among young children in poor countries. Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, threw his support behind an ambitious debt-forgiveness plan for poor nations, Bellamy said.

But she acknowledged frustration at how abortion had overshadowed every other issue, and she bridled at accusations from some antiabortion activists that UNICEF promoted abortion. “We do not support abortion,” she said.

But UNICEF does support children’s health programs in countries where abortion--and abortion counseling for minors--is legal. And the aggressive promotion of condoms, contraceptives and sex education is the cornerstone of juvenile AIDS prevention programs throughout the developing world that UNICEF aids. Much of the dispute here took the form of debate over perceived “code words” in a nonbinding document few people will ever read.

For the antiabortion activists represented in the U.S. delegation, the term “reproductive health services” implied endorsement of abortion as one birth-control option for adolescents. After failed efforts to amend or footnote the phrase, it was dropped entirely.

The original declaration draft referred to “various forms of the family”--common in U.N. documents on social issues. The U.S. sought to have “family” explicitly defined as one derived from “marriage between a man and a woman.” But this was objectionable to European officials whose constituents include many single-parent families and unmarried couples with children, and the Americans backed down.

American advocates for children’s rights said they were heartened by U.S. positions on other issues, such as child labor prohibitions. While the administration opposes the Convention on the Rights of the Child, U.S. delegates said it would seek Senate ratification of two optional side agreements to the convention, one banning the use of child soldiers, and the other criminalizing the trafficking of children for prostitution.