 Joan Kaufman opened the WCW spring luncheon seminar series with
“Bringing Cairo to Beijing: The Global Women‘s Movement, Reproductive
Rights and the Chinese Family-Planning Program.” Formerly the Ford
Foundation program officer for the Gender and Reproductive Health
Program in China, Kaufman is currently a special consultant on global
issues at WCW. Focusing on the recent history of China’s emerging
women’s movement, Kaufman highlighted the influence of two major
international conferences, the 1994 International Conference on
Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing, on the rethinking and reform of China’s
population and family-planning policy. Both conferences addressed the
tension between national population-control programs and the
reproductive rights of individuals, and both espoused a position
affirming the primacy of rights protection and women’s social and
economic empowerment. The Fourth World Conference on Women was a
catalytic event for many women in China who were exposed to the
international women’s movement for the first time and, as a result,
began to address the negative impacts on women of China’s population
program.
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