Local Doctor Chosen for Women’s Conference : Human rights: Glendale physician is the only California resident selected by the White House to attend event in Beijing.

A Glendale doctor has been named to the official delegation that will represent the United States at an international women’s conference in Beijing next month.

Dr. Laila Al-Mayarati is the only California resident among the 45 delegates selected by the White House, said Kathleen Hendrix, a State Department spokeswoman.

“They looked for geographic representation, for demographic representation--race, religion, ethnicity--and also expertise in certain areas that are issues in the platform,” Hendrix said. Al-Mayarati said she will lend not only her knowledge as an “obstetrician/gynecologist, but also as a Muslim woman with Middle Eastern background, serving as a liaison between the U. S. delegation and Muslim countries.”

The doctor, who is also president of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Women’s League, will be among the more than 30,000 women from around the world expected to attend the fourth United Nations International Conference on Women. Several hundred from the Los Angeles area are expected to join about 6,700 American women who have registered to attend.

The conference has been at the center of political controversy. Until Friday, the First Lady’s participation had been doubtful because of allegations of human rights abuses in China and the arrest there of American activist Harry Wu. But following Wu’s release Thursday, the White House announced that Hillary Rodham Clinton will attend.

Local participants such as Al-Mayarati say the goal of the conference--to improve the condition of women around the world--is paramount and politics should be set aside. “Anywhere you would have this conference you would find violations against women in one form or another,” said Al-Mayarati, who has a private practice in Glendale. “The conference needs to take place. Not going doesn’t achieve anything whatsoever.”

The Americans attending will represent a cross-section of the nation, said Billie Heller, a key local activist. “There’s Democratic women and Republican women. A lot of young people. A lot of new faces.”

Many participants had been preparing for the conference for months and in some cases years. With or without the First Lady, American women were ready to take part in the international dialogue.

“It’s just more important that people from this country are playing a role in trying to find solutions to human rights crises,” Barbara Perkins of Sylmar said.

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Perkins will participate as a representative of the Valley Chapter of the National Council of Negro Women. For Perkins, the conference will be a rare opportunity for women to work together on issues--poverty, equality in the workplace, child care, health care--that affect their lives wherever they live.

“As women, the barriers are more alike than not,” she said. So might be the solutions, she added.

Those who attend the conference will have their work cut out for them. Al-Mayarati and Perkins have participated in pre-conference meetings where women discussed a draft of the Platform for Action, a document that will be adopted at the conference. Those gatherings provided a glimpse of the difficulties involved in forging a consensus.

At an international pre-conference meeting in New York in March, participants spent a portion of the time arguing over semantics and questions of sexuality and reproductive rights.

“What you have evolving is this almost questionable dichotomy between secular feminist approach and a religious approach,” Al-Mayarati said. At the New York meeting, women debated the use of the terms “universal human rights of women,” which implies that a woman’s rights are no different than a man’s, and “fundamental women’s human rights,” which implies that the rights of women are different than those of men, Al-Mayarati said.

At a meeting in Thousand Oaks, women debated the use of the word “family.” Women who were on the right politically argued that the document did not include enough references to family and was too feminist in its approach, Perkins said.

“What gets lost when you get stuck in these debates about words is the goal of the conference, improving the condition of women,” Al-Mayarati said. “You have to deal with the reality of what women are facing, severe human rights violations, everywhere, all over the world, violence against women, unequal access to education and health service. We’re almost neglecting these tremendous, very serious issues related to women that most women agree on.”

At the conference itself, Al-Mayarati will also serve as a representative of the Muslim Women’s League, an official participant that received approval from the Chinese government. Her experience as a Los Angeles resident--witnessing the debate surrounding immigration and the problems related to health-care services because of budget problems--will be useful at the conference, she said.

Perkins, meanwhile, will speak as a member of a conference panel on “The Role of Young African American Women in the Global Community.”

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The conference is the fourth in a series of women’s conferences that have been held in each major region of the world. In past years conferences have been held in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi. This year’s conference was due to be hosted by an Asian country and only China applied.

Like women worldwide, local women have had a difficult time making plans to attend. Making hotel reservations, obtaining visas and receiving the accreditation necessary for non-governmental organizations have been a nightmare, Heller said.

“There’s been a lot of confusion with this conference both politically and logistically,” said Heller, a key local organizer and longtime women’s rights activist. “There’s a lot of intransigence on the part of the Chinese.”

Because of these problems, and in some cases “concern for personal safety,” some local women have dropped out, she said. Still, many women are hurdling the obstacles and will be heading for Beijing over the next few days.

“Everything is a full circle in my view,” Perkins said. “Those things that are global issues are things that affect us right here at home.”