Mr President, no one can now continue to deny the link between poverty and the lack of any rights with regard to reproduction and sexuality. Nor can anyone continue to plead ignorance regarding the ways in which, in certain countries, women’s rights on these matters are abused. This evening’s debate enables us to demonstrate how urgent it is to make substantial funding available for setting up infrastructures covering the people who are most vulnerable, the provision of information, basic public health care and methods of contraception. The undertakings given at the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo should be maintained and honoured. While more than ten million children die each year of curable diseases in developing countries, and while forty million people with HIV-AIDS also live in developing countries, the initiatives of the European Union are even more important when the present situation also features the attempt by the United States – fortunately unsuccessful at the moment – to include in the Plan for Action recently adopted in Bangkok the promotion of fidelity and chastity as the sole means of protecting people against sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) or AIDS. This debate, and I would like to thank our rapporteur for her work on the subject, has to remain serious. A society which sets up as a model the so-called ideal family cannot be anything other than a moralistic and sectarian society, of which women are always the first victims, with their rights being all too often dependent on the goodwill of men, whether father, husband or brother. What sort of society do they think they are creating, when on the one hand there is the US District of Columbia, which still denounces extra-marital sex as a crime, and on the other there is Nigeria, where women are stoned for the same reason? The emancipation of women and the full development of everyone requires rights and actions. These include the inalienable right of women to have full control of their own bodies, without any constraints, and also to have the freedom to choose when they have a child. As for the right to abortion, it still has to be defended, and for some women, including some in Europe, it still has to be acquired. On this point, having been warned by Polish women’s groups and feminist organisations, I should like to draw the attention of the Commission and of the Council to a real and present threat. The Polish Government is apparently asking now that the Treaty of Accession which it is getting ready to sign with the Union should include a reference to morality, culture and the promotion of life, which would in fact legitimise the current restrictive law on abortion in Poland. Like the sixty percent of the population of that country who are opposed to that law, I would like to associate myself with the appeal launched against the inclusion of any such statement in the Treaty of Accession. The Commission and the Member States would be giving a very bad signal to those people, in particular women, who believe in the values of liberty, dignity and the emancipation of our European societies. Finally, I think the time has finally come to make more funding available for that proportion of development aid which is spent on health and education. That is why I support the amount of funding proposed by Mrs Sandbæk in her report.

Political group: GUE-NGL