POPULATION-KOSOVO: UNFPA and Vatican Tussle over Contraceptives

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 15 1999 (IPS) - UN Population Fund (UNFPA) officials lashed out at the Vatican Thursday for criticising the agency’s provision of special “emergency” contraceptive pills to Kosovar Albanian refugees.

“I am surprised and disappointed at the Vatican’s statement condemning the provision of emergency contraception to Kosovar refugees,” UNFPA Executive Director Nafis Sadik said. “It shows an insensitivity to the suffering of the women of Kosovo.”

The UNFPA, which has provided reproductive health kits to Albania intended to serve approximately 350,000 people for three to six months, also took issue with Italian media reports that alleged that the agency had delivered supplies of the “abortion pill” known as RU-486.

Sadik declared that UNFPA did not provide abortions or abortion-linked technology like RU-486. The population agency had responded to humanitarian crises for many years by providing “emergency contraception” – steroid-based pills which prevent the implantation of ova if taken within 72 hours of a sexual encounter, she said.

Such contraceptives actually had proved useful in preventing abortions and suffering among refugee women who have been raped, Sadik said.

“Of the thousands of women coming across from Kosovo, we know some of them have been the victim of rape,” Sadik said. She noted that, in previous refugee crises, there has been the need for emergency contraceptives and psychological counselling to deal with the high incidence of war-related rape.

“We do not expect the Kosovo crisis to be any different – if anything, given the recent history of the region, we might expect to see incidences of systematic rape,” she argued. “The women of Kosovo need our support and care, not our condemnation.”

Nevertheless, the Vatican – which, in accordance with Catholic doctrine, continues to oppose contraception in general – has objected to emergency contraception as equivalent to the provision of abortion.

Monsignor Frank Dewane told delegates reviewing population policy at a special forum at The Hague in February that emergency contraceptives induced abortion and “can in no way be considered family planning”.

By contrast, the World Health Organisation (WHO) last month gave its own technical evaluation of emergency contraception and declared that it prevented implantation – but did not induce abortion. UNFPA follows the technical advice of the WHO, Sadik said.

Still, for many UNFPA critics the issue was not one of technology and science but of the politics of the anti-abortion movement.

US Representative Chris Smith, a right-wing Republican from New Jersey, last year accused UNFPA and other UN agencies of providing “abortion on demand” in refugee camps by including emergency contraception in health kits.

Sadik countered that the kits could actually reduce the number of unsafe abortions in the camps by helping address the needs of women who have been raped. UNFPA data showed that, in one camp in Tanzania, “the number of induced abortions was extremely high” because many women had been impregnated by rape, Sadik noted.

The Vatican-UNFPA dispute began long before the current Kosovo crisis, in which an estimated 517,000 ethnic Albanians have been expelled from the Yugoslav province during the past three weeks.

In general, however, UN agencies have faced severe challenges in providing assistance for the large refugee population in neighbouring Albania and Macedonia.

“The response was inadequate, because nobody anticipated the scale of what happened,” said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

UNICEF has doubled its staff in Macedonia and Albania in recent weeks so it can provide clean water, blankets, medicine and baby supplies for refugee children.

As with the women who have fled from what some rights groups claim is a widespread incidence of rape, many children who have left Kosovo are facing severe distress and trauma, Bellamy added.

“Beyond the initial, overwhelming physical need faced by these children is the devastating, lasting psychological shock of what they’ve experienced,” she said.

“Our challenge is not only to keep these children alive, but to create environments that are child-friendly and that restore some minimal sense of normalcy to their lives.”