Cairo: false evidences
Sommary
di Paola Melchiori
For women coming back from Cairo it's time to "draw up the balance". The point is to see what has happened to their voices in what was represented as the struggle between religious fundamentalism and the "rational-progressivist front" represented by family planning promoters. What is left of the topics women focused on during the long preparatory work for the conference, in the number of meetings snatched away from official occasions, ignored by the press, in which a standpoint was reached - it ad to consider so many distances: distances of live situations and of world concepts. That standpoint was also made up of those distances and of the attempt not to be divided in front of what was perceived as an attack: for the force of imposition, for the means at disposal, for the evident will of the "bigs of the word" to dictate their own laws on female bodies. The Conference was sponsored by Banks, big corporations, General Motors, suddenly worried about women's health. It's underground of society that today is thrown on the world scene: women's bodies, true "moitie's dangereus", seem to have the planet's ruin or salvation in their. The general acknowledgement of an unedited women protagonism is also part of the representation: undeniable protagonism of concepts and language. Many women are satisfied: it's a victory to have key concepts of women's movement, principles that come from their struggle, acknowledged in a UN document: "equality", women's empowerment, "reproductive rights". The opening of the family concept towards that of individual, important for all those who don't correspond to the model of mononuclear family. Less clear is the possibility of being subjects of fertility regulation, autonomously, and the separation of this women's need/right from the necessity that women - and principally poor women - should be the only ones to resolve the equation/alarm: population / poverty / pollution. Even less clear is the relation between reproductive rights and the rest of "women's human rights": the relation between the idea of population control and women's possibility to live in complete dignity. It's not a matter of finding funds as it is pointed out by many. It's a question of more subtle mechanisms, for example: what does the enormous fund issuing for family planning mean in a situation of general cuts to social costs? Who will control the effects of contraceptive technologies on women's health? They will be a great market for northern pharmaceutical companies. Who will evaluate the ultimate effects of these programmes, whose financial support will be given, according to ponoes organisations' mechanisms, directly to the governments, as a conditionality for any other financial support? The knowledge of the reality surrounding women's life in the South, the knowledge of the actors who play the roles and of the mechanisms through which programmes concreteness in southern countries prevent optimistic dreams: who will control female fertility controllers? And on whose behalf of? That is the reason why, at the end of the Conference, women constituted a Task Force whose assignment is "to keep watch" on what will happed the after-Cairo. At this point it's worthwhile recalling some key aspects, emerged from within discussions and contrasts as well, among women during in the preparatory process of the Conference. These aspects were progressively concealed by the discussion about abortion. They can contribute to a more realistic evaluation of victories and defeats, illustrating the intents that lay behind the words: the gap between words and facts. What slipped away has two principal aspects: one regarding women's politics and the other more general regarding the entity and sense of population alarm. The first aspect concerns the contrast between those who insist and support family planning though integrated and enhanced by global reproductive health - the core of this position is the concept of "reproductive right" - and those who reject the concept itself of population control and family planning as well, outlining the importance of contextual social components of reproductive health. It's not by chance that at Cairo next to women's public hearings denouncing the horrors of illegal abortion, there were women's public hearings denouncing the failure, the horrors, the corruption and coercion committed in the south under family planning. Then the fact that the differentiation between the two positions also follows a geographical line between North and South is not indifferent. As a matter of fact, those women who up to now have experimented family planning in the South, such as in India and Bangladesh, are the ones to denounce limits, inefficiencies and coercion. And mainly American and northern women, since ever active in claiming liberty of reproductive choice, are the ones to support its utility. What this contrast and the not few integration attempts point out, is very important. The relation between reproductive health and the other aspects of women's life in very different contexts is the point: the sense that family planning centrality has with respect to primary general: health; the consequences of entrusting the family planning management to an organism such as UNFPPA, that has never been brilliant in integrated and non coercive politics, rather than to an organism such as UNDP, that has dealt with integration programmes between social and economical development with a more advanced views. Have final beneficiaries of these politics any say, any control who will watch "working methods" in the past greatly used in the South: from the material incentives given to women in order "to help them" accept contraceptive measures to the award and punishment system given to medical operators of the programmes in relation to the numerical targets reached. How to evaluation of a policy completely and solely trageted at, women, as if a situation of sexual power between men and women didn't exist the: a contextual situation of reproductive health, whose functioning and internal differences cannot be ignored. It is a central component of a plan that on the contrary tends to homogenise the world in a single model: the north american small family - happy family model. The aim of those women who refuse the population control concept is therefore that of drawing the attention on what risks to be lost if we give to the population problem a demographic approach or if we reduce it to an issue of pure reproductive rights: Women's experiences can remember us what really happens within these great programmes. They remind us that to talk about "fertility regulation" produces refusal and failure if a life with no dignity, no possibility, no basic health guarantee is not recognised to women. That it has no sense talking about choice and contraceptive freedom if the only survival condition is the precarious existence of some children helping at work, if the right of choosing contraception becomes a choice among different technologies and in a further suppression of men's responsibility. Femminisation tragic in Africa is a fact agricultural products price fall, medicines disappear from the "public" market, medical facilities close, there is no work, men despair, women keep things going: they work more eat less, they die more for anaemia and "maternal mortality" (that doesn't regard so much childbirth as the sanitary conditions in which it happens). Today they are starting to die of those obscure illnesses such as hypertension and "bad life": silent suicides, the impossibility of making it in front of what is asked from them. This is the feminisation of poverty. What's the sense in giving women also this responsibility and focus all the programme on them as if men didn't exist? The second aspect lies upstream from the Conference and is the context of the previous. It's a matter of discussing about "reasonableness" of the population alarm. In that, Southern countries find themselves defeated at the conference like women. This aspect, altogether, implies a profound analysis of the interlinkages between economic development and family planning policies in pilot countries; principally the sense that this aid-politics line takes in the context of structural adjustment, time and in the distribution balance between resources and consumption in the relation between North and South. Respectable economists have in fact pointed out the unreasonableness of population alarm. Replacing global numerical evidence with precise analyses differentiated for country and for continent, setting in cross-analyses the economical policies and whether or not people want population control policies. A. Sen, in particular, has demonstrated that there isn't a direct and proportional relation between food production and poverty, between population growth and environment destruction. Moreover, many cases of demographic successes haven't positively affected general impoverishment. On the contrary, exemplar cases of success in childbirth reduction, such as Kerala, China, Sri Lanka and Costa Rica show, though in different approaches, how much the decrease in population depends upon precise choices of economical policies, such as whether to abandon or not agricultural investments, and upon general standards of living conditions in particular of women's, that is, upon social investment policies. "Scare tactics", Sen says, "not only are false but dangerous as well, because they dissuade attention from social development": in terms of investments, from women's education and from basic health. besides, they hide the fact that the the 25% of the world population who consumes 80% of natural resources, is the northern one; the alarm turned only to southern countries and to their uncontrolled reproduction thus has a clear ideological aspect: it only regards the South, it isolates one aspect from the context as the only cause of poverty. In this context at least it is permissible not to be too ingenuous: what does it mean to move international aid financing and its conditions towards family planning on behalf of the same forces that promote structural adjustments, those Banks that today become development Agencies, when their principal aim is cutting social costs in the South? During GATT negotiations, which will bring to a definite ruin poorer countries included by force and without any protection in the great arena of international market, no-one took these aspects into consideration. The stake behind the Conference of Cairo isn't any different from that of the UNCED of Rio: there nobody wanted to talk about population and here about consultation patterns or debt. The important is to keep the two questions separate, where their reproaching would mean questioning the essence of the development model of the North. The voice of those women that, "extremistically", from the South refuse the idea itself of population control, wants to bring back to the foreground the choice of ethics and civilisation that is at stak. The population problem means to ask each other: does the idea of democracy still have a sense for everyone on the planet or are we heading towards a concept of natural selection between rich and poor?. Replacing the concept of "caring capacity" to that of "carrying capacity", they refer to a more general analysis that involves everyone and that implies a model of interdependent life. Here we too - women of the North - are involved. For us the right to contraception has been the product of a struggle obtained within the context of a model of life which maybe we don't know up to what extent we could-would like to do without. Consumption implies values, balance between the desire of being happy and the goods that seem to assure this happiness, and the relation between market dominion and life quality. Which are, from our point of view, the indicators? The questions' set go beyond reproductive rights or different collocations in this context: they contain a question we also set on the capacity to produce, perhaps yet before, really different models of life, relation, cohabitation and happiness.