UN meeting on women begins today

So Samhita beat me to the chase a bit on this one, but just to elaborate a bit…
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) begins its two-week run starting Monday in New York City. I know a lot of folks aren’t really into the UN processes (for varying reasons), but this meeting should be really interesting.
Firstly, over 5,000 people (mostly women) have registered for the meeting from all around the world. Also, this particular CSW marks the ten year anniversary of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, a meeting that resulted in the Beijing Platform for Action, an agenda for women’s empowerment. For a lot of great background info and ideas for action, check out Beijing and Beyond.
During the next two weeks there will be a tremendous amount of events, discussions, panels and official UN meetings; I’m hoping that I’ll be able to blog about a good number of them.
First bit of juicy gossip concerning the meeting:
Thursday night the U.S. started up shit during a discussion of the political declaration for CSW. They proposed an amendment to a paragraph which discusses reaffirming the Beijing Platform. They wanted to add a statement saying that “reaffirming does not create any new international rights and does not include the right to abortion.”
Shocking, I know.