May 12, 2002 - The United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children (UNGASS) was supposed to address all issues affecting the lives of children, including the high rates of HIV/AIDS infection, unwanted pregnancy, sexual violence and exploitation, and child marriage.
The Bush administration, however, chose to ignore these realities and manipulated the negotiations to placate its ultra-conservative constituency. The resulting outcome document merely reaffirmed previous global agreements protecting adolescents’ reproductive rights. It neglected, however, to adopt additional proactive commitments to improve adolescents’ reproductive and sexual lives.
"It was tragic to witness our government callously disregard the reality of millions of adolescent girls in the U.S. and around the world," said Katherine Hall Martinez, acting director of the Center for Reproductive Right's international program. "Due to the U.S.’s questionable diplomatic maneuvers, the world’s governments lost an opportunity to come together and aggressively address the epidemic of HIV/AIDS cases and unwanted pregnancies that continue to destroy the lives of adolescent girls."
The Bush administration allied itself with the world’s most notorious human rights violators including Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and Iraq. What resulted was a compromise in which no one, least of all adolescent girls, emerged the victor. In the end the U.S. agreed to retain references to reproductive and sexual health in order to protect its "right" to carry out the death penalty against minors.
The critical topics and their outcomes are listed below.
- Abstinence Only: Latin American, European, and other industrialized countries held firm against the U.S. delegation’s battle to restrict sexual education and information to "abstinence-only until marriage".
- Definition of Reproductive Health Services: The U.S. desperately worked for the adoption of a definition that would explicitly exclude abortion from reproductive health services, including where abortion is legal, in an effort to undercut the definition adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994. Countries from Chile to Canada rejected this and the language adopted reaffirms previous UN conferences. It fails, however, to explicitly delineate what actions government should take to ensure the reproductive rights of adolescents.
- Redefinition of "Family": The U.S. attempted, and failed, to redefine the "family" to include only those formed by marriage between a man and a woman.
- Convention on the Rights of the Child: The final outcome document of the UNGASS acknowledges the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child, stating, "[it] contain[s] a comprehensive set of international legal standards for the protection and well-being of children." However, due to the United States’ insistence, it fails to specify how governments should further rely on the Convention’s nearly universally agreed standards in their continuing efforts to promote, protect and ensure children’s inalienable rights.
"UN conferences always involve compromise, but the UNGASS involved bullying tactics by our U.S. negotiators in an attempt to foist on the rest of the world an ultra-conservative agenda that the vast majority of Americans would never support," said Martinez.
|
The reality the U.S. chose to ignore during the UNGASS negotiations:
According to UNICEF, over 1/3 of the estimated 36.1 million people currently infected with HIV/AIDS globally are adolescents.1 Despite the health risks of early pregnancy both to mother and child, girls aged 15-19 give birth to approximately 13 million infants annually.2 Furthermore, the disproportionate number of adolescents hospitalized for complications resulting from unsafe abortion can be attributed in part to their lack of access to comprehensive reproductive health care information and services.3 |
1 http://www.unicef.org/specialsession/about/
sgreport-pdf/sgreport_adapted_stats_eng.pdf p. 28
2 http://www.unicef.org/specialsession/about/
sgreport-pdf/sgreport_adapted_stats_eng.pdf p. 16.
3 For example, the International Women’s Health Coalition reports that in Malawi, Uganda and Zambia, adolescent women represent one-fourth to one-third of patients suffering from complications, and in Kenya and Nigeria, more than half of women with the most severe complications are adolescents.
http://www.iwhc.org/uploads/ACF7DF%2Epdf p. 1.
UN Committee Calls on Russia to Improve Teen Access to Reproductive Health
