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This past September, 170 world leaders gathered at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York for the 60th session of its General Assembly. The media focused on President Bush’s speech on terrorism and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s struggles with the oil-for-food scandal that had recently tainted his administration.
But one thing on the official agenda did not get much media notice—the evaluation of the millennial goals, adopted by 189 world heads of state in the year 2000, which proposed to end extreme poverty by the year 2015. The September gathering hoped to evaluate progress made on the goals and to determine how best to move forward on them.
In all, there are eight millennial goals:
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To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
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To achieve universal primary education.
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To promote gender equality and empower women.
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To reduce child mortality.
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To improve maternal health.
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To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
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To ensure environmental sustainability.
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To develop a global partnership for development.
The first seven goals concentrate on the specific strategies for eliminating poverty, while the eighth implies that it will be done by wealthy countries delivering aid, providing debt relief, and establishing free-trade policies. One of the underlying concerns behind the millennial goals—not explicitly mentioned but never far from the surface—is the question of overpopulation.
Word Games
Following President Bush to the podium was the Vatican secretary of state, Angelo Cardinal Sodano, who raised the moral and ethical issues behind the program:
We cannot offer an ambiguous, reductive or even ideological vision of health. For example, would it not be better to speak clearly of the “health of women and children” instead of using the term “reproductive health”? Could there be a desire to return to the language of a “right to abortion”?
His concerns were well-founded. In late August 2005, the Vatican Holy See had to issue a warning that a document titled “Religious Declaration on the MDG’s, Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health” was being circulated prior to the September UN meeting for the purpose of broadening the terms “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” to include abortion, contraception, and other illicit means of family planning. The Holy See raised public awareness of the initiative because it knew that—if adopted—the resolutions would strip the Church’s efforts to defend human life.
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