The Ankh, Egyptian symbol of Life.

Based on a careful analysis and mapping of the religious territory since Cairo, David Devlin-Foltz identifies areas of common ground in the ICPD's program of action and recommends the following collaborative efforts:

• Intensify collaboration where agreement is easiest — girls' education and child survival — but do not permit increased funding for these worthwhile interventions to crowd out family planning.
• Allow women from developing countries to define empowerment for themselves. They will probably frame the issues in terms of addressing poverty and injustice. Publicize and be guided by those perspectives.
• Permit couples in developing countries to determine the number and spacing of their children as an aspect of empowerment. Accord them the same level of control over fertility as couples in the United States have as a matter of justice.
• Denounce coercive family planning and misplaced incentives loudly and often.
• Denounce domestic violence and coercive sexual relations loudly and often.
• Make environmental arguments for environmental programs; avoid environmental arguments as a basis for promoting reproductive health and family planning programs. These arguments can do more harm than good by invoking fears of the overpopulation paradigm.
• Work with local faith-based groups as grassroots program implementers wherever possible.
• Provide every possible assurance that family planning is voluntary, and that abortion is neither routinely performed nor "promoted," even where local law permits it. To this end, an interfaith, international advisory commission with the power to undertake site visits in collaboration with local religious leaders would help restore public confidence in USAID-funded population programs.
• Take the moral nature of the struggle seriously; listen and speak compassionately in response to moral arguments.