Goals Set by U.N. Conference on Children Skirt Abortion
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
UNITED NATIONS, May 10 - After nearly 30 hours of bitter, nonstop negotiations over teenagers and sex, delegates to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children tentatively agreed tonight on a declaration of goals.
The Bush administration and its allies from the Vatican and some Islamic countries failed in their bid to get an explicit policy against making abortion available to teenagers. Nor did it manage to make abstinence for unmarried teenagers the centerpiece of sex education.
Those pressing for a family to be defined as a married man and woman lost in their efforts as well. The United States did win in its attempts to play down the importance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a landmark 1989 treaty that the United States has not ratified.
A ban on executing criminals under 18 - something the European Union had backed, against the wishes of the America delegation - did not make it either. As a result, the declaration does not oblige any country to abolish capital punishment for juveniles, a practice allowed by nearly half of all American states....
...The most fractious debates during the three-day session concerned the use of the term ``reproductive health services.'' That language did not endorse abortion as a family planning method, but declared that abortions ought to be safe in countries where they are legal.
The Bush administration argued that the phrase connotes abortion. They sought to remove it or amend it to exclude abortion explicitly.
Delegates from other nations, including those from predominantly Roman Catholic Latin American countries, had opposed the United States' efforts to limit what other countries can offer as part of a menu of reproductive health services.
Tonight, the Bush administration achieved partial victory. The term ``reproductive health services'' was expunged from the document, but it contained document no specific proscriptions....
...The United States is one of two countries that have yet to ratify the children's convention. Somalia, the other holdout, signed the convention earlier in the week, and is expected to ratify it. The United States has opposed the treaty, in part because it condemns the use of capital punishment against minors....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/international/11CHIL.html> -- Yoshie
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