The following article is excerpted from a larger work titled, "A Map of Attitudes and Actions among Religious Americans Regarding Policies to Address Global Population Growth."

Did the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo create consensus on how to respond to the crisis of world population growth? No analysis of the outcomes of this watershed event is complete without an attempt to address the support of religious Americans and their institutions. Faith can form — and at times defend — a social consensus on the value of funding international family planning efforts. Religious institutions provide a ready-made mechanism for organizing grassroots support for policy change. But religious values can just as easily and just as powerfully motivate political opposition.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, religious support for global efforts to stabilize population growth was affirmed by a number of faith groups. In 1965, for example, the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods within the Reform branch of American Judaism expressed its concern about "the world's exploding population," which it saw as a threat "to the structure of family life." Similar statements from mainline Protestant organizations were motivated in part by predictions of future global famine and environmental crisis. By the mid-1970s, nearly all the religious groups active on U.S. policy issues recognized that rapid population growth could hamper efforts to combat poverty and improve the health of women and children.

But over the next twenty years, religious groups in general concluded that to focus narrowly on limiting population growth in the developing world would not address the unjust distribution of wealth and other structural causes of poverty, or the disproportionate impact of wealthier nations on the global environment, nor does it justify the violation of individual rights by use of coercive means.

As the United Nations readied itself to formulate a new twenty-year program of action for addressing population growth at the ICPD in 1994, religious groups developed a new way of addressing rampant population growth. The new strategy balanced concern for the environment with concern for the rights of women and girls and a critique of unsustainable patterns of consumption.

Hard-Fought Consensus
At the ICPD, religious organizations joined secular women's rights groups, reproductive health activists, development experts, ethicists, and government officials from around the world. This gathering finally and profoundly changed the international community's approach to addressing population growth. A theologically conservative Roman Catholic critic, George Weigel, concluded, "The most significant development at the Cairo conference may have been that of a shift in controlling paradigms: from 'population control' to 'the empowerment of women.'" Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the predominantly Protestant National Council of Churches (NCC) and a member of the official U.S. government delegation to the Cairo conference, hailed "the new understanding that we cannot solve the problems of poverty and rapid population growth without improving the status of girls and women." Americans representing a range of faith perspectives joined in praising the "Cairo consensus."

Many of the Programme of Action's most significant passages represent compromises carefully worked out among competing perspectives, including religious ones. Most prominently, the document's key statement on abortion reads, "In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning," while instructing governments to ensure the provision of safe abortions wherever they are legal and to provide humane care for the consequences of unsafe abortions everywhere. And the document's rejection of coercive practices and incentives is categorical: "All couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education, and means to do so."

The Cairo Programme of Action, moreover, avoided the overpopulation arguments and demographic targets that had characterized earlier U.N. statements on population issues. The 179 countries whose delegations approved the final document by acclamation on 13 September 1994 included states as religiously diverse as Egypt, India, Sweden, Thailand, and the Holy See. Indeed, the Holy See's signature (albeit accompanied by an official written statement clarifying its disagreements on certain points) was unprecedented in the twenty-year history of UN population conferences.

Little wonder, then, that delegates from around the globe cheered and wept at the conclusion of the conference. At least at the level of international commitments, global population and development strategy was transformed. Were American religious attitudes toward population policy transformed as well?

Did Cairo Redraw the Map?
Within the United States there is some evidence that the Cairo consensus has had an impact on religious support of population policy. The commitments to women's empowerment and to a broader definition of reproductive health articulated at the ICPD became key organizing themes for mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish groups in anticipation of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. Materials produced by the NCC, Church Women United, and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, among others, urged women of faith to pressure the U.S. government to keep the commitments to women's empowerment made at Cairo and subsequently reaffirmed at the Beijing conference.

But other powerful forces were and are working in the opposite direction. The November 1994 elections ushered in a congressional leadership committed to a balanced budget and a reduced role for government, hostile to expanded international assistance in general and to USAID's population programs in particular. Long-time foes of abortion rights now find the terrain much more to their liking. In this new landscape, the policy recommendations of such pro-life organizations as Focus on the Family and its close affiliate, the Family Research Council (FRC), loom large. And in their commentaries and the policy recommendations that have ensued, it is as though the Cairo consensus never occurred. Gracie Hsu's July 1997 study for the FRC of population policy, Population Imperialism: The Growing Backlash against U.S. Policy, contains no direct quotations from the Programme of Action and no acknowledgment of the 179-nation consensus it represents. Instead, FRC alleges that nations were bullied at the ICPD by the United States into acquiescing in a narrow, feminist, pro-abortion agenda under threat that their development assistance would be cut off. Hsu offers scant evidence in support of this allegation.

Where Is the Common Ground?
What ground do established advocates for the Cairo agenda hold in common with politically influential evangelicals? For those who would build a religious constituency in the United States for publicly funded efforts to promote the ICPD's approach, the challenge is complex.

Elements of the Cairo accord already guide some of the actors on the religious map. Areas of common ground for efforts to improve population policy seem obvious. But centrist, compromise positions, by definition, leave some advocates unsatisfied. And single-issue activists have little use for compromises that duck their issue. The common ground among religious advocates is in fact small and the footing treacherous. Advocates of increased U.S. support for international voluntary family planning and other elements of the Cairo agenda, however, have no choice but to navigate this difficult terrain.

David Devlin-Foltz is the director of the Faith and Public Policy Program at the Aspen Institute.