*************************************************************************** The electronic version of this document has been prepared at the Fourth World Conference on Women by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in collaboration with the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Secretariat. *************************************************************************** AS WRITTEN Fourth World Conference on Women Beijing, China, September 7, 1995 Mrs. Mongella, distinguished delegates, and guests. Thank you for inviting me to speak. My name is Jeanne Head. I am the International Right To Life Federation's (IRLF), representative to the U.N. in New York. I speak on behalf of IRLF, as a woman, as an obstetric nurse, and as one who has spent my life caring for women and children. IRLF is a world-wide Federation of pro-life organisations from over 170 countries. We are dedicated to the protection of all innocent human life from conception to natural death. We see a woman's life as a continuum deserving compassionate protection and support beginning at her conception and proceeding throughout her entire life cycle. IRLF is committed to ensuring respect and protection for women during the later years of their life when they are most vulnerable to abandonment by their families or society, to securing protection and appropriate assistance for young women and their children who are susceptible to social neglect, and to the full protection of the girl child from the very beginning of her life in her mother's womb. Universally, women need basic security such as housing, medical care before and after pregnancy, educational opportunities, protection from physical or mental abuse, and societal respect. A woman's life is enhanced by a supportive and loving family life as daughter, sister, mother, wife and friend. Tragically abortion is the most destructive act within the family -- destroying ties between mother, father, and child. Where abortion has been legalised, we have already seen great damage to women and the family as a result. Unfortunately the overemphasis on "reproductive health" in this and other U.N. documents neglects the wider and urgent health and social issues of women everywhere, particularly in the developing world.. Women in many parts of the world need clean water, nutrition, and basic health care for themselves and their families -- not the "right" to violently destroy their children before they are born. This draft document contains bracketed language referring to so called "unsafe abortion" with the false and dangerous implication that abortion, if legalised, can be made safe. Women suffer serious, physical, emotional, and psychological damage and even death from so- called "safe legal abortion". Just last month, in New York City in my own country, one doctor had his licence temporarily suspended for botching the legal abortions of several women and another was convicted of second degree murder for causing the death of a woman during a so-called "safe" legal abortion. These are not isolated examples in the United States. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the dramatic decline in maternal mortality rates in the developed world coincided ". . . with the development of obstetric techniques and improvements in the general health status of women." There is ample data for documenting this in the U.S. where the most significant impact of legalisation of abortion has been an increase in the number of abortions. The US Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute, in a report of June, 1994 stated: "In most countries, it is common after abortion is legalised for abortion rates to rise sharply for several years, than stabilise, just as we have seen in the United States. " In the U.S. where abortion has been legal for over twenty yeas and where health standards ate high, maternal mortality is four times that of Ireland where abortion is not legal and which has one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. The key, therefore, to reduction in maternal mortality rates from all causes is to improve maternal health care. In the developing world -- where medical care, antibiotics, and even basic asepsis are scarce or absent -- promoting abortion would increase, not decrease, maternal mortality. And, of course, abortion is never safe for the youngest member of the human family -- the unborn child who at the time of the abortion at eight or ten weeks of pregnancy already has a beating heart, brain waves, eyes, eats, fingers and toes. The girl child is in special danger from the practice of female foeticide as well as female infanticide. The internationally recognised magazine The Economist in it’s August 5,199S issue commented "When abortion is legal and routine . . . it is almost impossible to regulate sex selection abortion." It is important for the delegates to remember that abortion was rejected as a fundamental right and as a method of family planning by the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo last year. And it is urgent for you to understand that the document presented to you here in Beijing distorts and expands on the Cairo document in regard to abortion and so-called “reproductive health" issues. The selective and unqualified use of the language from the Cairo document in the Beijing document can only be interpreted as an attempt to circumvent and undermine national constitutions and laws. The governing paragraph protecting national sovereignty, for example, which appeals as the first paragraph in Chapter 2 on Principles in the Cairo document has been put into the Beijing document as a bracketed footnote the idea of which is also bracketed. Unless this Beijing document is amended to accurately reflect the language and intent of the Cairo ICPD document, it can give license to financially powerful governmental and non-governmental organisations to interfere with the abortion policies of at least 95 sovereign nations whose laws provide protection for unborn children. The concerns I've voiced today ate shared by hundreds of NGO groups represented at this conference. Our views are not represented in the NGO report that has been distributed to the delegates. We urge the many delegates who share our beliefs to stand firm against the cultural imperialistic tactics of the Western world.