U.N. Children's Summit Hits Snag

Delegates at a U.N. session on children haggled Friday over a final declaration, with the United States, the Vatican and Islamic states in favor of sexual abstinence and against any hint of abortion for adolescents.

The three-day conference was long on rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood but short on consensus on the question of education — a key topic of the meeting — after U.S. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson articulated a conservative position on matters of sexuality, notably the teaching of abstinence as the preferred approach to sex education.

Delegates working on a final document that sets goals for governments on children's rights negotiated through the night and all day Friday to complete work before the last speaker finished before midnight. But language on reproductive health services and a definition of the family was in dispute.

"In terms of sex education we have been adamant that abstinence be included as the strongest choice," a U.S. official said. "Abstinence is the solution to we the problems are discussing at this conference. All the other forms of sex education are dealing with the side effects."

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the American delegation was also pushing for stronger language to keep children under the age of 18 from being forced to work as soldiers or prostitutes.

Washington's team was in line with the Vatican and Islamic countries in holding up the final conference document because of opposition to mention of family planning services that critics say implies abortion.

Catholic Latin America opposes this group along with the Europeans, including Poland, and most African nations.

Vatican representative Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo made its position clear Thursday.

"When moral values are trampled on with impunity, when the atmosphere is artificially charged with eroticism, when the meaning of human sexuality is emptied and trivialized and children are even induced into unspeakable 'lifestyles' and behavior in an alarming climate of permissiveness, the risk of violence grows," he told the General Assembly.

The conservative U.S. delegation also opposes a U.N. treaty on children's rights that almost every other country has ratified — the United States and Somalia are the only holdouts — on the grounds that codifying such rights impinges on the rights of parents and opposes the death penalty for juveniles.

The difficulty in finding compromises is that several of the explosive issues were worked out in previous U.N. conferences on population, women and AIDS meetings.

"We will not turn the clock back on previously agreed principles," said one British diplomat of the European Union.

"The Bush administration is behaving as if they are all three branches of government," said Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition and a U.S. delegate at previous U.N. conferences on social issues.

"Their positions are contrary to the Supreme Court, a majority in Congress and U.S. public opinion who support adolescent reproductive health and education," she said.

Beyond sex, a draft General Assembly resolution introduced by 22 nations, including South Africa, Afghanistan, Cuba and Arab states, says Palestinian children under Israeli occupation "remain deprived of many basic rights."

Arab delegates put off a vote but said they would revive it if the final document were not adopted.

The children's conference, organized by UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund, is a follow-up to a 1990 summit that aimed at setting guidelines in the areas of education and health for children for governments, advocacy groups and U.N. agencies.

Many of those targets have not been met, due to lack of funds. Since then, the issues of AIDS and child protection have emerged as critical problems for children.