Disputes over reproductive rights take centre stage here Tuesday when UN delegations review population policy and wrap up preparatory meetings on the follow- up to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

Progress has been slow during the Mar 24-31 discussions, called to discuss the ICPD Programme of Action, five years after the conference was held in Cairo.

The meeting’s working group only began its session on Friday, after delays in coordinating responses by developing nations to the follow-up agenda, which will be the focus of a special session of the UN General Assembly this June.

Even at that point, the issue of reproductive rights threatened to snag the talks, with some conservative Catholic and Islamic states uneasy about approving any broad language on rights.

Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, Bangladeshi ambassador and chairman of the talks, said that some “interested delegations who feel they have lost out in Cairo” were opposed to some of the language on rights. But he added that the ground rules for the meetings ensured that all sides are to adhere to the language of the ICPD Programme of Action.

Despite that adherence, some nations seized the opportunity to take issue with the rights-based approach, and even to weigh in against abortion and other issues.

Argentina, for example, proclaimed last Thursday “the day of the unborn child” and took the occasion to reiterate the agreement in Cairo that abortion cannot be regared as family planning.

The Vatican took the lead in many of the disputes, scolding the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), World Health Organisation (WHO) and other UN agencies for supporting the use of “emergency contraception”, such as birth-control pills which can be used within 72 hours of intercourse.

In a working-group exchange, WHO argued that such contraception in no way could be linked to abortion, since the devices prevented the implantation of ova but did not destroy implanted eggs.

But the Vatican delegation countered that ova could be fertilised without being implanted – and therefore that such pills induce abortions rather than serve as contraceptives.

In a separate attack on rights, the Holy See has also used working-group discussions to strike out at efforts to educate adolescents about sexuality – an initiative strongly supported by the United States and European Union. Yet the preparatory talks were marked by a relatively low level of disputes.

Many nations concentrated on efforts to improve the low level of funding for population activities rather than becoming entangled in the thorny issues of abortion and sexuality that dominated the Cairo conference.

Even the United States, which last year defunded the UNFPA because of Congressional opposition to the agency’s support of Chinese family planning programmes, has pledged to increase population planning support and to resume UNFPA funding by the next fiscal year.

(UNFPA’s 32-county programme in China is now monitored independently to ensure that the government does not enforce any targets or quotas for family planning.)

That effort, however, hit a snag when Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, lashed out at UNFPA’s continuing support for “China’s coercive one-child-per-family policy” and urged that no funding resumption take place.

In a letter to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Helms wrote, “If UNFPA wants American support, it is not unreasonable to ask that UNFPA, as a first step, terminate its programme in the People’s Republic of China until it is independently verified that women are no longer forced to undergo an abortion for all but their firstborn.”

UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik, however, said that US officials also were free to monitor the agency’s China programme and added, “From what I hear, they are fully satisfied by what we are saying.”