Dewey's speech provoked a storm of angry reactions from the other delegates, none of whom saw the language of the proposed U.N. plan of action as being in conflict with these principles.

Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, a Saudi Arabian national and the UNFPA's executive director, responded to Dewey in a speech Monday, saying that the Cairo document "states, and I quote: 'In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.' The meaning of the phrases 'reproductive health' and 'reproductive rights' are not in doubt."

Other delegates were less charitable in their remarks. What angered Zonny Woods, director of government relations for Action Canada for Population and Development, was the hypocrisy of Dewey's statement, given that abortion and contraception are legal in the United States "Most distressing," she said, "is the U.S. delegation's failure to acknowledge that access to reproductive health services is already a reality for women in many countries, yet for hundreds of millions of women elsewhere, it is still a dream."

The U.S. State Department responded to the onslaught Tuesday with a statement that its interests were merely the welfare of women worldwide. "We continue to support the many goals and principles of the 1994 international conference on population and development," said the statement. "We are disappointed that so much attention at the conference was focused on this language rather than on improving the lives of people in the region."

Because the U.S. is the largest donor of aid to the developing world, a win for the White House would not have been merely symbolic. The U.S. under the Bush administration has already veered sharply to the right this year on international reproductive health issues by de-funding the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, which provides voluntary family planning services to developing countries. The $34 million cut was a direct result of lobbying by the far-right group Population Research International, which falsely charged the U.N. fund with complicity in coercive abortion and sterilization in China. An independent investigation led by Secretary of State Colin Powell disproved this claim, but President Bush made the cut anyway.

According to Bruce Cain, a political analyst at the University of California at Berkeley, these actions show that the religious right is now calling in its chips with President Bush -- and Bush is delivering. "International health is the area in which the president has the most discretion," Cain said in an interview. "He doesn't have to go through Congress. You would expect in areas where he has greater discretion, he's going to give things to the right. International health is not an area that's obvious to the average taxpayer. It's politically safe."

As a domestic political bargaining chip, $34 million is more important symbolically than financially -- it's not considered a lot of money in foreign-aid terms. But overseas, the opposite is true: $34 million is enough, according to the UNFPA, to prevent 2 million unwanted pregnancies, nearly 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 infant and child deaths.

"The impact was stunning," said Amy Coen, president of Population Action International, a U.S. nonprofit. "This is a man who stopped contraceptive services to the poorest women in the greatest need."

According to Coen, the U.S. vote at the U.N. conference is a harbinger of what's to come in the U.S. -- and no one's paying attention. If the wording changes had passed, it would have built momentum for domestic restrictions in access to legal abortion and contraceptives, she said in an interview. "We've had these rights for so long that it is extremely difficult for an American to grasp that we have an administration that doesn't support contraception. We can't believe it. We think that can't possibly be right. But [this administration] is out to dismantle the reproductive rights women have had for years. They're doing it methodically and they're doing it below the radar screen. They know that middle-class Americans who vote don't pay attention to international issues, but they can make sure [the news of the U.N. vote] shows up in the newsletters of the far right."

Cain supports this view. "We're waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said, "and that will be when we get to the Supreme Court appointments. That's the Super Bowl of this whole business. I have no doubt that the debts [to the religious right] will be paid off in the choices Bush makes for those appointments."

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