What Happened in Cairo? A View from the Internet

Abstract

The usual United Nations Conference is carefully prearranged in a series of runup meetings, and the conference itself consists of political leaders reading a prepared script and ends in the signing of a document negotiated in advance among middle-level officials. The bland result has in itself no force of law, and even the knowledge of its existence is confined to limited circles of the public. The Cairo Conference was different. The Vatican, backed by a number of Muslim countries, threw down a gauntlet in its firm opposition to abortion, cohabitation without marriage, and sexual deviation; it was at least suspected by all parties that underlying these was access to birth control and empowerment of women. The challenge was accepted, and responses by secular leaders, outstanding among them several prominent and eloquent women, were unusually vigorous. The challenge and response made the Conference resemble a sporting contest, and so gave the Press an opportunity to exercise its skills: an unprecedented flood of dispatches went forth from Cairo. The word was carried not only by the media, but undoubtedly beyond them by word of mouth to women in many countries. From the official viewpoint, the Conference had gone wildly out of control. At the end the temperature was lowered by compromise on a form of wording that could be agreed to by European liberals and their middle-eastern opponents alike: without condemning abortion, it said that abortion is not to be considered a means of family planning. This ingenious compromise put the Conference back on the track laid our by officials for the very important last day. But nothing can put back on its previous track the thinking of people, especially women, reached either directly by the media, or indirectly through friends and neighbours who had followed the media. The broadcasts were of a nature that supports the new modem attitudes that are in any case diffusing from the West. This unofficial and unplanned social consequence of Cairo could not have occurred without the stand taken by the Papacy and the Muslim countries that sided with it, and the newsworthy debate that these generated. Without that acrimonious debate the Conference would have ground through its preordained course, attracting little notice outside of official circles. What from the official viewpoint was a waste of valuable conference time was from a wider perspective a contribution, small but not insignificant, to a worldwide movement.