Just don't go: why is the UN Conference on women being hosted by the most radically anti-woman regime on earth?

National Review, August 14, 1995 by Robert P. Casey, Robert P. George

Mr. Casey, former governor of Pennsylvania, is chairman of the Campaign for the American Family. Mr. George is an associate professor at Princeton and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Despite pleas from human-rights activists across the political spectrum, President Clinton has decided to send a high-profile delegation, under the honorary chairmanship of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and including at least two members of his Cabinet, to the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women next month in Peking.

China remains a totalitarian police state that systematically violates every civil liberty. It holds thousands of political prisoners including, as we write, Harry Wu, a veteran of the Chinese gulag who, after becoming an American citizen, returned to China to further document the Chinese government's use of slave labor.

More to the point as regards this conference, China's population-control policies are known to include both coerced abortions and the forced sterilization of women who become pregnant in defiance of the government's "one-child policy." This policy encourages sex-selection abortion and even infanticide of baby girls. It has led to a demographic shortfall of tens of thousands of female children who have been destroyed for no reason other than their sex. In view of these abuses against women and children, it is more than perverse for the United Nations to hold a conference on women under Chinese auspices and for the United States to participate.

No one should imagine that the Clinton Administration is sending its delegates to Peking to confront the Chinese government on its record. This Administration, after all, stands by an Immigration and Naturalization Service policy that refuses asylum for women who have entered the United States after fleeing a regime that imposes abortions and sterilizations. And the State Department has made it plain that the United States will do nothing to embarrass China's rulers at the conference.

For their part, Chinese officials are shrewdly taking advantage of the conference to legitimize their population-control policies. Indeed, they have gone so far as to appoint Peng Peiyun, director of the state agency that enforces the one-child policy, to be co- chairman of the planning committee for the conference. This is the moral equivalent of naming Bull Connor to chair the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

WHY is the Clinton Administration playing along? The answer can only be the enormous power wielded within the Administration by radical feminists and population-controllers who regard the family and traditional morality as enemies of human progress. Groups such as International Planned Parenthood and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America view the Peking conference, as they viewed last year's World Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, as an opportunity to export to the developing world their ideology of "liberating" women from family life and, particularly, from children.

Central to this agenda is the international marketing of Western elite ideas of "sexual freedom" and a "right to abortion." In meetings held to prepare a draft of the document which will receive final approval in Peking, Western delegations, led by North Americans and Scandinavians, have insisted on using the term "gender," which they define as "socially constructed," rather than "sex," which is biologically fixed. There are two, and only two, sexes. There are, so far as "advanced thinkers" are concerned, at least five legitimate "genders": male and female heterosexuals, male and female homosexuals, and bisexuals.

More than academic theorizing is at stake here. What is going on is an effort to create an internationally recognized "human right" to "alternative lifestyles." For example, the draft suggests a right to sexual freedom for adolescents. As if there were not already enough threats to the innocence of children -- an innocence which is still valued in many developing nations and by the majority of Americans -- the draft calls for the broad dissemination of "information" about sexuality and birth control to young people throughout the world. Now, thirty years' experience with "sex education" gives Americans ample reason to know that, too often, the point of this "information" is to indoctrinate children in the ideology of "sexual freedom." And the proponents themselves are hardly unaware of this. A proposal by a Guatemalan delegate who had the temerity to suggest teaching children self-control rather than birth control was met with derision.

An attempt to create an explicit international right to abortion spectacularly failed last year in Cairo. So now the Western delegations are resorting to the euphemisms of "privacy," "termination," and the like to insinuate such a right into the Peking draft. Proving yet again that American radicals have never met an abortion they didn't approve of, they are now prepared to snuggle up to the Chinese perpetrators of coerced abortion and sterilization in the cause of spreading "the right to choose" to countries that still protect the right to life. This rather Orwellian idea of "choice" has not kept away from Peking the very people who not long ago led boycotts against states that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.