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U.S. Turns Religious Ideology Into Barrier To Progress on the Millennium Development Goals
September 15, 2005

The United Nations World Summit opened September 14 on a note of hope for women after negotiators agreed to keep reproductive health among the commitments that the gathering will make, according to Planetwire.

Two weeks of strenuous closed-door negotiations papered over many of the disagreements among the heads of state and government attending the three-day meeting, but the draft statement on reproductive health is clear. It will commit the leaders to “achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015,” and to integrating that goal into the strategies they adopt to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The agreement also contains strong language on promoting gender equality and women’s human rights, combating the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and strengthening national health systems to reduce maternal and infant mortality and save children’s lives.

The changes take a major stride toward reversing what reproductive health advocates regarded as a serious oversight by the same world leaders in 2000 when they failed to include the need to address population growth through family planning among the eight MDGs.
The following article, by religion and ethics scholar Lloyd Steffen, offers background on the struggle to ensure that family planning is part of the MDGs. Steffen is Professor and Chair of Religion Studies and University Chaplain at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A progressive Protestant clergy person, he serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. His latest book is The Demonic Turn: The Power of Religion to Inspire or Restrain Violence.

U.S. Turns Religious Ideology Into Barrier To Progress On the Millennium Development Goals
The single largest gathering of world leaders in history convened for the United Nations World Summit September 14-16 to evaluate five years of work on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce poverty. Tragically, conservative religious ideology that finds voluntary, freely chosen family planning services to be morally objectionable has been an obstacle to progress in the MDGs. Although study after study has found that a key to reducing poverty is raising the status of women and girls, largely through improved access to contraception and family planning, the Bush Administration and U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton worked to keep reproductive health care out of the MDGs. The direct reason, I believe, is a religious belief that is hostile to women’s equality and reproductive rights.

Ever since the 1994 United Nations population conference in Cairo, the world community has agreed on the need to increase access to family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention services and expand efforts to reduce unsafe abortions and maternal deaths. It is well established that the leading cause of death in women 15-49 in most countries is complications from pregnancy, unsafe abortions, and HIV/AIDS. In 1994 and thereafter, the United States took a lead in supporting the Cairo initiative by increasing funding for family planning, improving the quality of reproductive health services, and expanding U.S. interests in reducing violence against women and abuses of women’s rights. In the past five years, the United States has not only retreated from these initiatives but also reversed them. The most glaring examples of this reversal are the hold on funding to the United Nations Population Fund, the world's largest source of multilateral assistance for voluntary family planning; a “global gag rule” governing eligibility for U.S. aid to family planning clinics, and AIDS relief that emphasizes discredited “abstinence only” approaches.

The retreat under the Bush Administration is directly related to George W. Bush’s particular form of conservative Christianity and the agenda he shares with the followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on stem cell research, government funding of religious groups, women’s rights, and availability of abortion. For example, in one federal court nomination after another, the Bush Administration has advanced candidates for Senate approval who have taken up positions hostile to women’s reproductive rights. The so-called “partial birth abortion” ban legislation that has recently been overturned by three federal courts because it lacked a health exception is symbolic of what is going on: the fetus is to be honored and valued even if it poses a threat to a woman’s health. If the woman’s life depends upon a late-term abortion procedure, physicians under this law could not proceed to act in the best medical interests of their patient. Medical procedures are for the first time placed under political scrutiny, with the politics of the issue stemming from a particular religious-ideological stance. The “values issue,” never spoken about in the media, is that the Congress passed and the President approved a bill that said that, in a medical contest for life, the fetus ought to win over the pregnant woman. The appeal to conservative Christians, not only Protestants but also Catholics, has been quite successful in subtly advancing a view that for Protestants sanctifies and for Catholics sacramentalizes the fetus. In practical ways, fetal life is being granted a status superior to that of the woman whose life could be, in this perspective, legitimately sacrificed to preserve that of the fetus.

These views have far reaching implications not only for America but also for the world. It may at first seem preposterous to say that the Cairo consensus—which, like the Millennium Development Goals, has a global perspective—can be compromised and even threatened by one political leader or one American administration, but I think this is the case today. These objectives are difficult enough to achieve under the best of circumstances, but to have so major a player as the United States turn against them with its funding and policies renders their realization extraordinarily difficult. Given that the basis of objection springs from a religious ideology, religion itself becomes an obstacle to women’s rights and to the whole project of Cairo and the MDGs.

Were religion not in play around the abortion issue, we might hear a conservative argue like this: since we cannot possibly know when a fetus is to be recognized as a member of the moral community and thus granted by that moral community a right to life, we should give it the benefit of the doubt and grant it that status as early as possible. That is a “pro-life” position reasonable to make based on skepticism and even humility.

But what is driving the anti-choice position in the United States is a moral certainty about fetal humanity that is itself derived from religious conviction, with enormous yet also practical and familiar implications for stem cell research, reproductive health issues, HIV/AIDS education, and even poverty. The kind of religious extremism that pronounces moral certainty out of religious sanction generates priorities that divert funding from programs and policies that might otherwise recognize all persons as valuable and worthy of being helped and reduce the economic divide between rich and poor in America and in the world.

The movement for women’s rights has often been labeled an ideology, in an effort to dismiss or at least discredit it. But there is at work—against the Millennium Development Goals and against the spirit as well as the commitment of Cairo—an ideology that aims at continued suppression of women. That ideology is sanctioned by patriarchal religion and devalues women and dehumanizes them by rendering them not worthy of our health care efforts, not worthy of the status of autonomous decision maker, not worthy to receive education and financial assistance that would lift them out of poverty.

The tragedy of our time is, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, that we have the resources to end poverty but lack the will to invest in that effort. What King knew in his generation, we know in ours. It is vital to recognize that religion can play—has played historically and continues to play today—a vital role in how human reproductive issues are decided and human and financial resources are distributed. One of the great challenges of our time, in my view, is the need we have to direct moral critique at the religious ideologies that are destructive of people and nations and demeaning of human dignity.

Curiously, it is the religious community that understands how religion itself can grow destructive and incite violence, all sanctioned by appeal to ultimate reality, all in the name of God. Destructive (or what religion itself recognizes as demonic) religion responds to the same needs that life-affirming religion does—the need to belong, to have an identity, and to connect with transcendent sources of meaning—and it even offers something life-affirming religion will not: moral certainty grounded in those transcendent sources. Religion that is seeking to diminish women and restrict their freedom and devalue them as autonomous decision-makers is demonic—and attractive, and even many women will find it so. The connection of public policy to moral and religious ideologies requires analysis and serious attention for those seeking to lift up and improve the lot of women while expanding opportunity and freedom.

Today, we are at a crossroads—things may get better, they may get worse. It is necessary to engage progressive religious leaders and religion scholars to keep focused on what kind of energy is driving the movement to suppress freedom and restrict reproductive choice. The debate over direction should in my view involve non-governmental organizations like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice that are committed to bringing religious people of good will together to advance a life-affirming perspective on women’s issues.

We live in a world where religious ideology serves to inflict violence on women through policies and priorities that curtail reproductive freedoms. Religion serves those who would build hard ideological barriers that then serve the destructive purpose of eroding women’s reproductive freedoms, thereby demeaning women in their very humanity. That result is what Cairo and the MDGs are specifically designed to confront and resist, and religious people—and all people of good will—have a vital role to play in correcting the very problems religion itself has helped to create.