Life After Death

millions of women and men". At paragraph 30, the words, "Women should play a critical role in the family. The family is the basic unit of society and as such should be strengthened," were also added. The contribution of the liberal, developed nations - led by an intransigent European Union - was to make vigorous efforts to remove all references to human dignity; to portray the family and marriage as impediments to women's self-realisation, and to remove all reference to religion and ethics. The fiercest battles revolved around the language of 'rights', and there was a relentless battle to create new abortion- and sexual rights, to diminish parental rights, and to dismiss gender differences. Pregnancy was increasingly caricatured as a disease, and sterilisation and population-control measures as corrective medicine to cure it. The ultimate nightmare has occurred in China where Western liberals were having their 1995 conference.

The Ulitimate Nightmare In China, the United Nations Family Planning Association and the International Planned Parenthood Federation have funded the Chinese Population Association.

They, in turn, have been responsible for China's one-child policy and have practised widespread forced abortion and forced sterilisation of women to achieve it. Not only is it illegal for a child to have a brother or sister, but new eugenics laws allow disabled babies to be killed after birth. No Chinese women were permitted to attend the 1996 conference to speak about their experiences.

Moving the Goalposts In order to secure the gains of Beijing, the Western liberals used all their expertise in formulating the Istanbul agenda and in determining which delegates would be there. In what amounted to a privatisation of diplomacy, a new range of delegates was created for Istanbul. The diplomatic goalposts were shifted to suit liberal interests. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were allowed to participate in working group meetings, and the 'Women's Caucus', together with the United States delegation, proposed that they should also have the right to speak at the informal drafting sessions. This substantially reduced the speaking rights of the smaller nations and gave extraordinary rights to non-elected, self-appointed denizens of Western-based pressure groups. The liberal agenda-setters also knew that small countries, such as Catholic Malta or Guatemala, could only afford to send tiny delegations, often dwarfed by the highly organised, well-financed and articulate NGOs. Several other G77 countries, including Venezuela, El Salvador and Honduras declined to attend, perhaps believing - after their experiences at the earlier conferences at Cairo and Bejing - that their resources could be better used.

The chalk and cheese nature of the delegations graphically illustrated liberal priorities in comparison with those of developing nations. The West sent teams of professional negotiators; the G77 nations often opted for civil engineers or urban planners. Sophisticated politicians such as Baroness Lynda Chalker, who headed the British delegations in China and Egypt, have a long track-record of promoting