Amy Coney Barrett, Mary Ann Glendon and the Feminine Genius

National Catholic Register, 03 October 2020

Glendon was at the center of the Catholic Church’s pushback against a kind of feminism that pitted women’s public contributions against their mission in the family and culture.

When President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court last month, my mind traveled back 25 years ago to another September of high drama featuring another prominent Catholic woman. In September 1995, the U.N. Conference on Women was held — in Beijing, of all places — and Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard was appointed by St. John Paul II to head up the Vatican delegation.

It was the first time a woman had been appointed to head a Vatican delegation. The previous year at the 1994 U.N. Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the Clinton administration had committed American diplomacy to a determined push to establish abortion as a “universal human right.” 

John Paul fought back with equal determination and led an international diplomatic coalition against the American administration. After a titanic battle, the Cairo conference’s final document agreed that abortion should not promoted as a means of family planning. The Clinton push for a universal expansion of America’s unlimited abortion license had been defeated. 

Similar forces gathered the next year for the 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing. The Clinton administration, led by First Lady Hillary Clinton, had been chastened in Cairo, so did not take the same aggressive lead. But others did, with the European Union — supported by Canada and South Africa — attempting to achieve by the back door in Beijing what the Americans had failed to achieve in Cairo.

Glendon was at the center of the Catholic Church’s pushback against a kind of feminism that pitted women’s public contributions against their mission in the family and culture. 

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