Showdown in Cairo

The United Nations could hardly have picked a more appropriate place for next week's International Conference on Population and Development than crowded, chaotic Cairo. Home to 14 million people, the Egyptian capital shows all too clearly the consequences of the inexorable human drive to have children. Cairo's open space per capita must be measured in square inches, and the poorest citizens build shelters on rooftops, in cemeteries and in the city dump. Cramped conditions are nothing new, of course, but even old-timers lament that population pressures are making Egyptians "bestial" to one another.

Cairo is also buffeted by all the political, cultural and religious forces that tend to interfere with effective birth-control programs. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has worked hard, with some success, to curb the country's growth rate, and the government is proud to be hosting a conference expected to attract up to 20,000 participants, including several heads of $ state. Egypt's fundamentalist Muslim sheiks take a different view, however, drawing cheers from their followers when they denounce the meeting as a "Zionist and imperialist assault against Islam."

The organizers of the conference don't see it that way, but they do admit that the purpose of the gathering is to bring about a radical shift in the world's population policies. For three years, representatives from 180 nations have been laying the groundwork at preparatory meetings, and unlike delegates to previous population negotiations, they invited substantial contributions from women's groups. The result is a tentative plan built around the idea that the key to curbing population is enhancing the status of women around the world. The plan, which has the support of the U.S., calls for channeling $17 billion annually by the year 2000 into many local programs, including those that would give women better educational opportunities, easier access to family-planning services and improved health care. Other proposals would finance campaigns urging men to shoulder more responsibility for contraception, child rearing and even housework. Says Nafis Sadik, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund and the guiding force behind the conference: "There is a strong focus on gender equality and empowering women to control their lives, especially their reproductive lives." This approach drew immediate objections from advocates of traditional family planning, who were worried that a feminist agenda would divert money away from proven birth- control methods.

Such language drew early and fervent protests from the Vatican, which sees "control their reproductive lives" as a code phrase calling not only for access to artificial birth-control methods but also for abortion on demand. When Pope John Paul II met with Sadik earlier this year, he delivered a message condemning abortion as a "heinous evil" and followed up by calling the proposed plan a "project of systematic death." Sadik maintains that the conference plan does not endorse or encourage abortion, but merely declares that the millions of abortions performed every year should be done under conditions that ensure the safety of the women.