Population Plan Gets Final Touches : Conference: Sex and reproduction are handled frankly in compromise draft. Vatican support remains to be seen.

Finally clearing nagging disputes over reproductive health, birth control and migrant workers, U.N. drafters completed an ambitious new population plan Monday that U.N. officials say has allowed the world for the first time to deal frankly with sex and spiraling human reproduction.

The plan, scheduled for adoption today by nearly 180 nations gathered for the International Conference on Population and Development, contains important compromises with both Roman Catholic and Islamic nations aimed at assuring that sex education, reproductive health care and family planning programs comply with each nation’s own religious and cultural traditions.

It emphasizes that abortion is not encouraged as a family planning tool and leaves that contentious issue--which at one point threatened to overtake the conference--up to each nation’s own legislation.

“It’s all over but the shouting,” Timothy E. Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs and the U.S. delegation chief, said of today’s upcoming floor debate.

U.N. officials said the program of action finally agreed on by the conference drafting committee after an exhausting series of meetings represents the world’s first attempt to deal openly with the root causes of soaring fertility rates and to develop programs that emphasize not government coercion but individual choice.

“The number of completely new notions compared to what has come out before--of reproductive health, reproductive rights, the notion of unsafe abortion being a major health problem which governments have to do something about--all these things are there,” said Nicolaas Biegman of the Netherlands delegation, who was vice chairman of the drafting committee.

“Sex, something that we only whispered about before, is a normal item of conversation in the Western world now, and it’s becoming a normal item of conversation in the rest of the world. This document is helping bring that about,” Biegman said. “We are putting their noses in it. You have to talk about sex--you have to talk about it just like real estate prices.”

The diplomacy over the past week has very much reflected the growing influence of religion in political life. The Vatican and Islamic organizations to a great extent framed the debate over issues such as abortion, family planning and sex education in an attempt to ensure that traditional family values would not be lost in the rush to provide new sexual health care options.

It remains to be seen whether the Vatican will sign on to the document today. Although it contains a number of concessions over issues such as non-traditional marriages, abortion and sex education, the Holy See and half a dozen Latin American and Islamic countries continued to have reservations about the document.

The Vatican has declined to support each of the last two U.N. population programs, adopted in 1974 and 1984.

“Some time will be required to examine in greater detail the full implications of the complete chapter, while it is transmitted . . . to the plenary, where we will make a formal declaration,” Vatican delegate Msgr. Diarmuid Martin said.

But U.N. delegates said the Holy See has demonstrated a quiet sense of realism in this year’s debate, fighting determinedly and skillfully for concessions on the abortion issue, yet barely mentioning another issue to which the Catholic church has moral objections: artificial contraception.

“They don’t even use the word ‘contraception,’ ” Biegman said. “The main thing they really, really fight for is abortion. They don’t push those points which they know they’re going to lose. As far as they’re supported by other countries, they win. And as far as they’re not supported by other nations, they give up.”

Yet he called attention to the Vatican’s status as a sovereign state, a church, and a full member of the U.N. conference because of its membership in U.N. organizations.

“If I were the Vatican, I would think next time twice about sitting as a full participant,” Biegman said. “I think they’ve been in a very difficult position because of their special position. They are a sovereign state . . . and they are a church, and the things are very difficult to combine.”

A variety of Islamic nations backed the Vatican on several issues, but in the end, many of them said they would support the population plan as long as it was clear they could implement it in their own way, according to their own interpretations and values.

To meet their concerns, a new paragraph was inserted in the preamble emphasizing respect for religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds, national sovereignty and internationally recognized human rights.

“All three of those components had to be there, or there would not have been an agreement,” said a U.S. official who participated in the compromise.

Hernando Calvijo, a Colombian who helped broker the most sensitive compromises, added, “The thrust of the document is that within a comprehensive document, there is room for individual approaches.”

In the last-minute bargaining that consumed much of the day, these are some of the issues decided:

* On the issue of global migration, almost lost as a population issue in the religious debate despite its importance, a fierce argument broke out over the issue of family reunification for migrant workers. Countries such as Turkey, Algeria and Cuba, which export migrant workers, wanted to have family reunification declared a right. Receiving nations such as the United States, Canada and Australia said it was only a principle. In the end, the delegates used neither term, simply referring instead to existing U.N. conventions and urging governments to promote legislation on family reunification.

* The troublesome phrase “marriage and other unions,” which some countries feared could sanction homosexuality, was left simply at “marriage” because, U.N. drafters said, it was “too ambiguous.”

* In the area of adolescent sexuality, a passage calling for sexually active adolescents to receive contraceptive services was deleted, though it continues to say they should be given “special family planning information.”

* One of the most contentious passages was the section defining reproductive rights, in which the document says men and women have the right “to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of fertility regulation of their choice which are not against the law.”

The Vatican and others had objected to the phrase “fertility regulation,” saying it could mean abortion. As a compromise at the end of the day Monday, the wording was changed to “regulation of fertility,” and a majority of nations approved it.