U.S. Population Team Has Changed Jerseys in Last Decade : Growth: At ’84 conference, the Reagan Administration said expanding numbers had no bearing on development. Now Washington has led the way to adoption of strategies for curbing boom.

Ten years ago, the United States abruptly reversed decades of population policy and announced that the human species’ spiraling numbers were not necessarily the problem everybody thought they were.

Population, the U.S. delegation told a 1984 international conference in Mexico City, was “neutral as a variable” in global development. The team said free enterprise and privatization could promote enough development to allow countries to support their expanding numbers.

The Ronald Reagan Administration team helped draft language specifically excluding abortion as a family-planning tool and announced that the United States was pulling its funding out of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities because some of their clinics conducted abortions.

Blink 10 years, and it’s the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. And nothing is the same. The U.S. team changed jerseys.

Three days after taking office, President Clinton announced that he was restoring money for Planned Parenthood and the U.N. fund, and Washington has boosted financing for population aid programs by about $100 million a year over the past three years.

The U.S. delegation went into preparatory meetings for the conference with a decided abortion rights agenda, and during this week’s conference in Cairo has led the way toward adoption of a comprehensive package of strategies for curbing population growth, including issues such as empowerment of women, full reproductive rights, adolescent access to sex education and contraceptives with respect for “confidentiality,” and unsafe abortion as a health care issue.

A department of population has now been created at the State Department, and the United States went to this year’s conference after a major public meeting in Washington and nearly a dozen town hall meetings across the country.

Timothy E. Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs and head of the U.S. delegation, remembers when he attended his first U.N. meeting last year to discuss the Clinton Administration’s new population strategy.

“Their response was overwhelming,” he recalls. “There was a sense of electricity and excitement on the floor. Dozens of delegates came over and said, ‘Welcome back to humanity; welcome back to the world.’ ”

Conservative groups have criticized the Administration for pushing a strong abortion rights agenda and continuing to force contraception programs on developing countries as part of U.S. aid packages.

“They were very hard-hitting at PrepCom (the preparatory U.N. meeting held last spring), but that was mostly behind closed doors,” said Cecilia Acevedo Royals, president of the Washington-based National Institute of Womanhood, which is critical of the program adopted Tuesday.

“Tim Wirth was boasting that they were going to get universal access to abortion; they were saying there was going to be an international right to abortion. But behind closed doors is one thing. Now that the world is beginning to listen to the issues, they have the luxury to bring (Vice President) Al Gore in and say practically that their goals are the same as the Vatican’s. They’re soft-pedaling it now,” Royals said.

But members of the U.S. population team in Cairo insist they have long had a single policy of making abortion “safe, legal and rare” and are committed to developing a wide range of family planning and reproductive health programs, including tried-and-true contraceptive programs.

“We have stated time and again that we believe abortion should be rare, but what we are saying explicitly at this point is that the availability of family planning services makes abortion even more rare,” Brian Atwood, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in an interview.

Atwood conceded a “significant shift” in U.S. population policy but said it is directed primarily at significant funding increases and a new philosophical approach.

“We’ve adopted an integrated approach to development which will enable us to take a much broader approach to the population growth problem,” he said. “It isn’t just family-planning services. It’s also a lot of programs that affect women’s lives, that should have an impact on population growth. It’s an emphasis on girls’ education. It’s an emphasis on maternal health care. It’s an emphasis on child survival. It’s an emphasis on micro-enterprise, wherein poor women are given an opportunity to have a job with dignity.”

In addition to the $585 million a year the Administration has earmarked directly for family-planning programs around the world, an additional $600 million goes to these auxiliary programs, which have emerged as the key focus of the new U.N. document adopted in Cairo.

Wirth said the United States has taken an important leadership role in drafting these issues into the document and acting as a broker to help mediate conflicts.

“I think we go away from this meeting with the U.S. viewed very, very differently by many other countries, not only because we changed dramatically our policy on population, but because of the way in which we’ve done it, the understanding that we’ve shown, the partnerships that we’ve created. . . . This is something that is very new, at least in recent memory, for the United States,” Wirth said.

In many ways, analysts say, the Reagan and George Bush administrations, and now the Clinton team, were playing to different constituencies.

“There’s a close nexus between domestic politics and the American position on population, and it’s vividly contrasted by looking at Mexico City and the present conference in Cairo,” said Jason Finkle, a specialist in population planning and politics at the University of Michigan.

“Reagan benefited significantly from the pro-life movement, from the fundamentalist support, and Clinton has really had the support of the pro-choice lobby and the feminists. So each in a way had a constituency that they felt loyalty to, and I think ideologically they were in agreement with.”