Feature

A check-up for women’s health

The fourth World Conference on Women is due to be held in September. But many important issues will never reach the agenda, says Mandy Garner

The world seems to be awash with international mega-conferences on subjects ranging from the environment, population and development, to poverty and human rights. All human life is at these grand talk-shops, as well as half the world’s trees. But do they ever get anywhere? The next big United Nations event is the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September and already there are rumblings that the conference will be more of a rearguard battle than a progressive event where women’s health is concerned.

Women’s health groups were hoping that the Beijing conference would be an opportunity to broaden the international health agenda, but it looks as if they will be fighting to defend gains already made. The Cairo Conference on Population and Development last September was dominated by religious groups fighting a losing battle who attempted to hijack the agenda for their own political motives. It seems likely that these groups are hoping for a chance to settle the score in Beijing. Women’s bodies, as always, are being used as a battleground for power politics.

Angela Davies, of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), says she is saddened that the New York preparatory conference in April left so much still up for grabs in Beijing. Many of the resulting draft declaration’s issues concerning women’s reproductive health are in brackets, meaning that they have not yet been decided on. This includes issues that were debated at the earlier Cairo conference and even the use of the word ‘gender’ which has been explained and defined in many international documents.

Angela Davies says: ‘Many areas discussed and decided on at other international conferences, such as that women’s rights are human rights, are now again being called into question. These rights were accepted and the wording of them was accepted in Cairo. All this slows down progress. The IPPF doesn’t want Beijing to focus on this again, but others are using the Beijing process to open it up. The non-governmental organisations forum sent a very strong message to the conference’s steering committee that this was not on, that once again reproductive health was being used as a toy.’

Other NGOs are also concerned that the health agenda will be dominated by religious extremists to the detriment of other health issues. There were reports at the start of the New York meeting that some pro-abortion organisations had been denied accreditation. This has now been solved and these organisations can resubmit their applications for attendance.

Sue Tibbles, co-ordinator of the UK NGO forum, says the agenda on health seems very ‘traditional’, more or less confined to reproductive health which includes matters such as female circumcision and AIDS. The narrowing of women’s health issues to reproductive health limits women’s role to that of mother or potential mother. But there are many other health concerns such as the effect of the environment, women in conflict, rape, access to clean water, adolescent girls, elderly women and nutrition.

In Cairo, access to nutrition was a key issue for Third World women who argued that the right to development must come before other rights, as survival is the primary health concern. The right to development is at the centre of debates on issues such as human rights and the environment and is part of a wide-ranging political tug-of-war on resources and power. Many NGOs argue that rights are indivisible and must go hand-in-hand. In terms of women’s rights, this means that there can be no development without attempting also to support women’s human right to equality.

Eliminating inequality against women in all fields is what Beijing is about. In terms of healthcare, women’s unequal position means that they are more likely to have problems than men. This is reflected in their relative lack of access to decision making over priorities for health research.

The Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) would like to see the Beijing agenda widened to include non-traditional issues and those which involve women in the UK. They feel that many women in the UK will take no interest in the conference as it is discussing subjects which are not relevant to their own experience. They are planning a project on glamour and women’s images of themselves. ‘The Beijing conference is light years away from discussing such issues,’ comments Angela Moore of the WEN. ‘In the East, images of women repress their sexuality, but in the West kids are aware at a very early age of their sexuality and it can be dangerous. How do you bring these two sides together? If women were given the right to be powerful in their own selves, they would be a lot healthier.

‘The central issue is that women be acknowledged as equal. What happens is that there is divide and rule: pitting women from different cultures against each other.’

There has been criticism about the organisation of the Beijing conference, mainly in terms of lack of resources. There is a general feeling that the conference is not being given the resources it needs because women are the subject. There are only 10 people, for instance, working in the secretariat organising the meeting. Normally with a UN conference a budget would have been created and there would have been three preparatory meetings. The Women’s conference has had only one preparatory meeting which means that an enormous amount of issues still have to be discussed surrounding the draft declaration. There are also concerns that the general secretary of the meeting, Gertrude Mongella, may not have the iron fist necessary to steer the conference through all the likely controversies.

Angela Davies says that the steering committee did not seem to anticipate the strength of the Cairo backlash. She comments: ‘The secretariat is stunned and is doing its best in a very difficult situation. They don’t really have the staff to cope with the job. They spent the first 18 months discussing whether the conference could be done in one week or two for cost effectiveness. A discussion about half the world’s population (and the half of the population most highly represented among the poor) has had to revolve for 18 months around trying to cut it to a week’

Despite all the negatives, however, NGOs are still hopeful that the conference will get international publicity for women’s issues. Moreover, after New York, health - for good or bad - has moved up the agenda. As Angela Davies says: ‘Until New York, one of the faults of the document was that there was not much on health. It seems extraordinary that the powers that be thought they could get away with this. Now the whole section on health has been beefed up and there is a more holistic approach. This may make the Beijing document stronger. We’ll wait and see.’

It is surely important that such talking-shops occur - if only to publicise these issues and to put women’s issues in the spotlight for once. It may be that the conference’s main aims are obscured in the media by fighting among male-dominated religious institutions for control of women’s reproduction. But for many women’s groups, the conference will be a vital chance to meet, exchange views and strategies and gain friends and much-needed support.

As Gertrude Mongella says: ‘The problems of women are not different from country to country or region to region. They only differ in intensity.’ That is what Beijing is all about.