How could women and civil society organizations confront this constructively?
We should not just look at the UN context. Take other multilateral processes like the EU, for example. Groups of organized women working within religious traditions have to get accredited, they have to attend the meetings, they have to put out statements, they have to write to their governments, they have to get funding, they have to do all the things that other women and women’s groups do. For the special Millennium Review Summit last September, we put together a religious leaders’ statement where we contacted a couple of hundred religious leaders around the world. We talked about the third Millennium Development Goal on gender equality, and the relationship of that MDG to sexual and reproductive rights, which is not mentioned, but inferred – I am sure they know that you cannot have gender equality if you don’t have reproductive rights – circulated it to our own governments, circulated it to ministries of heath, circulated it to parliaments, in an effort to basically make sure that th
