Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-02-Speech-2-317"
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"en.20020702.14.2-317"2
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"Mr President, Mrs Van Lancker's report deals with an issue of particular concern to the Committee on Women's Rights and my political group and to each of us individually.
It has given us an opportunity to make two findings. First, there is an information vacuum in modern society on sexual and reproductive health issues, such as transmittable diseases and how to combat them, and contraceptive methods and their advantages and disadvantages. Secondly, there are differences between, and even, in certain countries, a lack of policies on, family planning, sex education and sexual and reproductive health services, and we have agreed to exchange best practices on promoting modern policies.
We engaged in an up-to-the-minute dialogue between the political groups in committee and representatives of European society and we agreed that these issues are vital to today's European citizens, especially women. However, we also made another finding or, to put it another way, we were the butt of particularly vehement reaction on the part of governments, political parties and representatives of women's agencies, because we are giving out advice and guidelines – not to mention taking decisions – on issues on which Europe has no authority. These concerns were taken as a very important political message by my group, especially now that we are trying to define our authority at European and national level and persuade the people of the European Union and the candidate countries that we respect democracy, subsidiarity and cultural differences, and we took on board the message that asking the Member States to legalise abortion or not to prosecute women who illegally terminate their pregnancy or to hand out the morning-after pill without a doctor's prescription does absolutely nothing for our credentials. It just creates confusion and distrust among our citizens.
When I and my colleagues in the Committee on Women's Rights visited Poland, we all stressed how important it is to engage in dialogue on women's rights at all levels and in all spheres of life and for policies to develop and adapt to new social and historic circumstances and Europe is not going to come along and reduce national ideologies, customs and conscience or cultural differences to the lowest common denominator.
I acknowledge the rapporteur's well-intentioned efforts to get us to agree on a text and I personally hoped that we might achieve a text which was acceptable both to us and to the people of the European Union. Unfortunately, the message to come out of the report is not the message which the Europe People's Party thinks the European Parliament should send out, which is why we shall not be voting in favour of the report."@en1
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