Vatican Steps Up Attacks Against Cairo Conference : Population: Delegation will fight draft resolution that endorses abortion rights, lower growth rates.

Fighting from a script written by Pope John Paul II, the Vatican on Wednesday fired a new broadside against a planned U.N. population conference, attacking the United States in general and Vice President Al Gore in particular.

A 17-member Vatican delegation leaves today for Cairo, carrying papal instructions to oppose unflaggingly a draft resolution for the Sept. 5-13 conference that endorses abortion on demand and takes a liberal view of human sexuality.

Supported by the United States, other governments and feminist groups around the world, such proposals are, nevertheless, seen by John Paul as a blatant assault on the sanctity of life, which he says begins at the instant of conception.

On Wednesday, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro, a member of the high-level delegation, took issue with Gore, who will head the American delegation and has said that the United States does not seek to proclaim a universal right to abortion.

“The draft of the document, which has the U.S. Administration as its principal sponsor, in reality contradicts Mr. Gore,” Navarro told reporters at a Vatican briefing. The Clinton Administration would allow American funds to flow to international groups that support abortion, reversing the policy of Republican predecessors.

Decrying what he called the document’s attempts to pass off “social engineering under the guise of human rights,” Navarro said Vatican delegates to the once-a-decade conference would seek to modify ambiguous language, clarifying draft phrases such as “reproductive rights” and “sexual health.”

In one of its fiercest, most outspoken international diplomatic initiatives in recent years, the Vatican has repeatedly attacked the 118-page draft, which explores ways for slowing rapid population growth that it portrays as a brake on economic development.

The Pope himself has spoken repeatedly against draft proposals, which he says would encourage promiscuity and homosexuality, erode moral values and undermine the family. John Paul, above all, wants the conference to ban abortion as a means of population control. It would also be disastrous, he believes, to assert that abortion is a woman’s fundamental right.

“Should (the conference) give further legitimacy to the legal practice of abortion, humanity would suffer another great failure of rights and justice,” the Pope said in a recent attack on the U.N. proposals.

The Vatican sees efforts by planners, economists and aid donors to limit population in developing countries as “biological colonialism.” It decries it as an effort to impose First World moral values--or the lack of them--on poorer and often more traditional Third World societies.

In attacking the conference, the Vatican has found common cause with some Islamic countries also opposing the thrust and content of the U.N. draft.

On Wednesday, top Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia called on all Muslims to boycott the Cairo conference. The Supreme Council of Ulemas, or religious scholars, said in Riyadh that the “immoral and heretical” draft document encourages abortion, contraception, premarital sex and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

After four days of deliberations, the scholars concluded that policies proposed by the document would transform Islamic society into “one of disease-ridden sex perverts without morals.”