U.S. Department of State 
95/09/05 Remarks:  First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton 
 
 
 
TEXT AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY 
 
 
 
                       FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON 
                               REMARKS FOR THE  
       WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION FORUM ON WOMEN AND HEALTH SECURITY 
                               BEIJING, CHINA 
                             SEPTEMBER 5, 1995 
 
 
 
Thank you, Dr. Nakajima. 
 
Dr. Nakajima, Dr. Sadik, Gertude Mongella, delegates to the Fourth U.N. 
Conference on Women, and guests from all corners of the world, I am 
honored to be here this morning among women and girls everywhere. 
 
I commend the World Health Organization for making women's health a top 
priority and for establishing the Global Commission on Women's Health. 
 
I am proud that in the preparatory meetings for this Fourth World 
Conference on Women, the United States took the lead in highlighting the 
importance of a comprehensive approach to women's health. That approach 
builds on actions taken at previous women's conferences and the recent 
conferences at Cairo and Copenhagen, whose goals to promote the health 
and well-being of all people were endorsed by 180 nations. 
 
Cairo was particularly significant as governmental and non-governmental 
participants worked together to craft a Program for Action which, among 
other things, calls for universal access to good quality reproductive 
health care services, including safe, effective, voluntary family 
planning; greater access to education and health care; more 
responsibility on the part of men in sexual and reproductive health and 
childbearing; and reduction of wasteful resource consumption. 
 
Here at this conference, improving girls and women's health is a 
priority of the draft Platform for Action. It includes such goals as: 
Access to universal primary health care for all people -- a goal not yet 
achieved in many countries, including my own. The promotion of breast 
feeding. The provision of safe drinking water and sanitation. Research 
in and attention to women's health issues, including: environmental 
hazards, prevention of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, 
encouragement for adolescents to postpone sexual activity and 
childbearing, and discouragement of cultural traditions and customs that 
deny food and health care to girls and women. 
 
Goals such as these illustrate a new commitment to the well-being of 
girls and women and a belief in their rights to live up to their own 
God-given potentials. 
 
At long last, people and their governments everywhere are beginning to 
understand that investing in the health of women and girls is as 
important to the prosperity of nations as investing in the development 
of open markets and trade. The health of women and girls cannot be 
divorced from progress on other economic and social issues. 
 
Scientists, doctors, nurses, community leaders and women themselves are 
working to improve and safeguard the health of women and families all 
over the world. If we join together as a global community, we can lift 
up the health and dignity of all women and their families in the 
remaining years of the 20th century and on into the next millennium. 
 
Yet, for all the promise the future holds, we also know that many 
barriers lie in our way. For too long, women have been denied access to 
health care, education, economic opportunities, legal protection and 
human rights -- all of which are used as building blocks for a healthy 
and productive life. 
 
In too many places today, the health of women and families is 
compromised by inadequate, inaccessible and unaffordable medical care, 
lack of sanitation, unsafe drinking water, poor nutrition, insufficient 
research and education about women's health issues, and coercive and 
abusive sexual practices. 
 
In too many places, the status of women's health is a picture of human 
suffering and pain. The faces in that picture are of girls and women 
who, but for the grace of God or the accident of birth, could be us or 
one of our sisters, mothers or daughters. 
 
Today, at least fifteen percent of pregnant women suffer life 
threatening complications and more than one-half million women around 
the world die in childbirth. Most of these deaths could be prevented 
with basic primary, reproductive and emergency obstetric health care. In 
some places, there are 175,000 motherless children for every one million 
families. Many of those children don't survive. And of those who do, 
many are recruited into a life of exploitation on the streets of our 
world's cities, subjected daily to abuse, indignity, disease, and the 
specter of early death. 
 
There must be a renewed commitment to improving maternal health. The WHO 
launched in 1987 a Safe Motherhood Initiative to halve maternal 
mortality by the year 2000. To reach that goal, more attention must be 
paid to emergency medical care as well as primary prenatal care. 
Providing emergency obstetric care is a relatively cheap way of saving 
lives -- and along with family planning services is among the most cost 
effective interventions in even the poorest of countries. 
 
The commitment of the WHO and its Global Commission on Women's Health to 
make childbearing and childbirth a safe and healthy period of every 
woman's life deserves action on the part of every nation represented 
here. 
 
One hundred million women cannot obtain or are not using family planning 
services because they are poor, uneducated or lack access to care. 
Twenty million of these women will seek unsafe abortions -- some will 
die, some will be disabled for life. A growing number of unwanted 
pregnancies are occurring among young women, barely beyond childhood 
themselves. As we know, when children have children, the chance of 
schooling, jobs, and good health is reduced for both parent and child. 
And our progress as a human family takes another step back. 
 
The Cairo document recognizes "the basic right of all couples and 
individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and 
timing of their children and to have the information and means to do 
so." Women should have the right to health care that will enable them to 
go safely through pregnancy and childbirth and provide them with the 
best chance of having a healthy infant. 
 
Women and men must also have the right to make those most intimate of 
all decisions free of discrimination, coercion and violence, 
particularly any coercive practices that force women into abortions or 
sterilizations. 
 
On these issues, the US supports the provisions in the Beijing Platform 
for Action that reaffirm consensus language that was agreed to at the 
Cairo Conference about a year ago. It declared that "in no case should 
abortion be promoted as a method of family planning." The Platform asks 
governments "to strengthen their commitment to women's health, to deal 
with the health impact of unsafe abortion as a major public health 
concern and to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and 
improved family planning services." 
 
Violence against women remains a leading cause of death among girls and 
women between the ages of 14 and 44 -- violence from ethnic and 
religious conflicts, crime in the streets and brutality in the home. For 
women who survive the violence, what often awaits them is a life of 
unrelenting physical and emotional pain that destroys their capacity for 
mothering, homemaking or working and can lead to substance abuse, and 
even suicide. 
 
Violence against girls and women goes beyond the beatings, rape, 
killings and forced prostitution that arise from poverty, wars and 
domestic conflicts. Every day, more than 5,000 young girls are forced to 
endure the brutal practice of genital mutilation. The procedure is 
painful and life-threatening. It is degrading. And it is a violation of 
the physical integrity of woman's body, leaving a lifetime of physical 
and emotional scars. 
 
HIV, AIDS, and sexually transmitted diseases threaten more and more 
women -- and experts predict that by the end of this decade more than 
half of the people in the world with HIV will be women. AIDS, which 
threatens whole families and regions, demands the strongest possible 
response. Governments and the international community must address head-
on the growing number of women who are being infected. 
 
More than 700,000 women worldwide face breast cancer each year -- over 
300,000 die of it. It's the leading cause of death for women in their 
prime in the developed world. In the time I speak to you today, 25 women 
around the world will die of breast cancer. In my own country, it is 
hard to find a family, an office, or a neighborhood that has not been 
touched by this disease. My mother-in-law struggled against breast 
cancer for four years before losing her battle. 
 
Tobacco use is the number one preventable cause of death. Ninety percent 
of women who smoke began to smoke as adolescents -- leading to high 
rates of heart disease, cancer, and chronic lung disease later in life. 
 
As the WHO points out, we also need to recognize and effectively address 
the fact that women are far more likely to be exposed to work-related 
and environmental health hazards. Policies to alleviate and eliminate 
such health hazards associated with work in the home and in the 
workplace demand action. 
 
Research also indicates that certain communicable diseases affect women 
in greater numbers. Tuberculosis, for example, is responsible for the 
deaths of one million women each year and those in their early and 
reproductive years are most vulnerable. 
 
When health care systems around the world don't work for women; when our 
mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and co-workers are denied access to 
quality care because they are poor, do not have health insurance, or 
simply because they are women, it is not just their health that is put 
at risk. It is the health of their families and communities as well. 
 
Like many nations, the United States brings to this conference a serious 
commitment to improving women's health. We bring with us a series of 
initiatives which represent the first steps to carrying out this 
Conference's Platform for Action. 
 
We are continuing to work for health care reform to ensure that every 
citizen has access to affordable, quality care. 
 
We are proposing a comprehensive and coordinated plan to reduce smoking 
by children and adolescents by 50 percent. 
 
We are working to address the many factors that contribute to teenage 
pregnancy, our most serious social problem, by encouraging abstinence 
and personal responsibility on the part of young men and women; 
improving access to health care and family planning services; and 
supporting health education in our schools. 
 
We are pursuing a public policy agenda on HIV/AIDS that is specific to 
women, adolescents, and children. 
 
We are continuing to fund and conduct contraceptive research and 
development. 
 
We are addressing the health needs of women through initiatives such as: 
 
--  The National Action Plan on Breast Cancer -- a public, private 
partnership working with all agencies of government, the media, 
scientific organizations, advocacy groups and industry to advance breast 
health and eradicate breast cancer as a threat to the lives of American 
women. 
--  An Expansion of the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early 
Detection Program -- which will ensure that women who need regular 
screening and detection services have access to them, and that those 
services meet quality standards. 
--  The inclusion of women in clinical trials for research and testing 
or drugs or other interventions that probe specific differences between 
men and women in patterns of disease and reactions to therapy. 
--  The special health care needs of older women will be addressed 
through educational campaigns about osteoporosis, cancer and other 
diseases. 
--  And the US is conducting the largest clinical research study ever 
undertaken to examine the major causes of death, disability and frailty 
in post-menopausal women. 
 
Women's health security must be a priority of all people and governments 
working together. Without good health, a woman's God-given potential can 
never be realized. And without healthy women, the world's potential can 
never be realized. 
 
So let us join together to ensure that every little boy and girl that 
comes into our world is healthy and wanted; that every young woman has 
the education and economic opportunity to live a healthy life; and that 
every woman has access to the health care she needs throughout her life 
to fulfill her potential in her family, her work, and her community. 
 
If we care about the futures of our daughters, our sons, and the 
generations that will follow them, we can do nothing less. 
 
Thank you for the work you do every day to bring better health to the 
women, children, and families of this world. Thank you for helping 
governments and citizens around the world understand that we cannot talk 
about equality and social development without also talking about health 
care. 
 
Most of all, thank you for being part of this historic and vital 
discussion, which holds so much promise for our future.