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Women's Rights: Why Not?
June 18, 2002
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - We now have a window into what
President Bush and America's senators think of the world's
women: Not much.
An international women's treaty banning discrimination has
been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating
men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United
States Senate ever since President Carter sent it there for
ratification in 1980. This month the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee got around to holding hearings on it,
but the Bush administration, after shyly supporting it at
first, now is finding its courage faltering.
The support came from Colin Powell's State Department, but
then John Ashcroft's Justice Department found out about the
treaty - and seems to be trying to defend America from the
terrifying threat of global women's rights. You'd think he
might have othe!
r distractions, like fixing the F.B.I., but
the Justice Department is conducting its own review of the
treaty in what looks suspiciously like an effort to
eviscerate it.
I wish Mr. Ashcroft could come here to Pakistan, to talk to
women like Zainab Noor. Because, frankly, the treaty has
almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy
the rights the treaty supports - opportunities to run for
political office, to receive an education, to choose one's
own spouse, to hold jobs. Instead it has everything to do
with the half of the globe where to be female is to be
persecuted until, often, death.
Mrs. Noor, a pretty woman with soft eyes and a gold nose
ring, grew up in the Pakistani countryside, and like her
three sisters she never received a day's education. At the
age of 15 she was married off by her parents, becoming the
second wife of the imam of a local mosque. He beat her
relentlessly.
"He would grab my hair, throw me on the floor and beat me
wi
th sticks," she recalled. Finally she ran away.
Her husband found her, tied her to the bed, wired a metal
rod to a 220-volt electrical outlet and forced it into her
vagina. Surgeons managed to save her life, but horrific
internal burns forced them to remove her bladder, urethra,
vagina and rectum. Her doctor says she will have to carry
external colostomy and urine bags for the rest of her life.
At least she survived. Each year about one million girls in
the third world die because of mistreatment and
discrimination.
In societies where males and females have relatively equal
access to food and health care, and where there is no
sex-selective abortion, females live longer and there are
about 104 females for every 100 males. In contrast,
Pakistan has only 94 females for every 100 males, pointing
to three million to seven million missing females in that
country alone. Perhaps 10 percent of Pakistani !
girls and
women die because of gender discrimination.
In most cases it is not that parents deliberately kill
their daughters. Rather, people skimp on spending on
females - just like Sedanshah, a man at an Afghan refugee
camp I visited near here. When his wife and son were both
sick, he bought medicine for the boy alone, saying of his
wife, "She's always sick, so it's not worth buying medicine
for her."
At Capital Hospital here in Islamabad, a nurse named
Rukhsana Kausar recalled fraternal-twin babies she had
treated recently. At birth, the girl twin weighed one pound
one ounce more than the boy. At seven months, their
position was reversed: the boy weighed one pound 13 ounces
more than his sister.
Critics have complained that the treaty, in the words of
Jesse Helms, was "negotiated by radical feminists with the
intent of enshrining their radical anti-family agenda into
international law" and!
is "a vehicle for imposing abortion
on countries that still prote
ct the rights of the unborn."
That's absurd. Twenty years of experience with the treaty
in the great majority of countries shows that it simply
helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In
Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after
being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced
to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape
execution.
How can we be against that? Do we really want to side with
the Taliban mullahs, who, like Mr. Ashcroft, fretted that
the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with
third-world girls who die because of their gender, more
than 2,000 of them today alone?
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