Vatican’s Voice for Women : U.S. Lawyer Brings Balanced Approach to Beijing Forum

When Mary Ann Glendon first met Pope John Paul II last November, she was struck speechless.

“He has that effect on people,” said Glendon, a Harvard University law professor and a prolific author of books on social justice who is not normally at a loss for words.

Speechless in Rome, Glendon has become the Pope’s voice in Beijing only 10 months after her first audience with him. The American heads the Vatican delegation to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, one of the most important missions ever assigned a woman by the male Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Given the Vatican’s active participation in previous conferences on women’s issues, Glendon, 56, is likely to play a key role in the debate over the “Platform for Action” that will be issued at the end of the 11-day conference on Sept. 15. Recognizing this, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday invited Glendon for a private discussion of the document with senior members of the U.S. delegation.

Glendon is an unusual choice for the Vatican role in two respects--political and personal.

Her extensive writings on comparative international abortion law indicate a flexibility and appreciation of compromise not evident in many official church positions. For example, she has written favorably about legislation in Germany and other countries that permits abortion under certain conditions in the first trimester of pregnancy.

“I am 100% against abortion,” she explained when asked about her writings that compare European policy on abortion favorably to that of the United States. “But the Catholic Church has [a] teaching about the relationship between the divine law and the human law that is in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other theologians.”

Generally, Glendon said, she is opposed to the criminalization of abortion because of its “punitiveness toward women.”

And Glendon’s personal life does not fit the mold of a typical papal envoy. Her first marriage, to an African American attorney she met in the civil-rights movement, ended in divorce after producing one child.

She is extremely uncomfortable discussing the early marriage, saying, “That took place nearly 30 years ago.” She explains that it was a “civil marriage” not recognized by the church.

But one result was that she spent three years as a single parent that made her more sympathetic to the plight of women attempting to work and raise children on their own. “I know what single parents are talking about when they describe their difficulties,” she said.

Glendon also talks about discrimination she faced as a young lawyer attempting to get a start in Chicago.

Her second marriage, to attorney Edward Lev, took place in the Roman Catholic Church. Lev, with whom she has one daughter, is Jewish. She said Lev has kept his own religion but dutifully trudged off to Mass each Sunday so that their children could have a Catholic religious upbringing. The couple recently celebrated their 25th anniversary.

Glendon, fair-skinned and blonde, with small hands that dance in front of her as she talks, spent her childhood in western Massachusetts, where her father was a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle. An accomplished student, she graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was editor of the law review at 22.

Later, she spent two years studying European civil law, including a year at the Free University of Brussels. For five years, she worked as a general corporate attorney with a Chicago firm, taking breaks to participate in the civil rights movement as a pro bono lawyer for the National Lawyers Guild.

Before joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 1986, she taught 18 years at Boston College’s Law School. An expert on property law, which she still teaches at Harvard, Glendon has written several books on a broad range of social issues from abortion to what she sees as the degradation of the nation’s legal system.

However, the book most relevant to her role as chief negotiator for the Vatican in Beijing is her 1988 work “Abortion and Divorce in Western Law.” The book reserves its harshest criticism for American abortion practices since the landmark Roe vs. Wade case in 1973.

“Only in America,” she wrote, “has a vast profit-making industry grown up around abortion.”

She describes the last two decades in the United States as an “abortion holocaust.” But in a 1988 interview with public broadcasting’s Bill Moyers, Glendon said she saw “a dark side to both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements.”

“I think that pro-choice has some silent support among some men who don’t want to take responsibility for fatherhood, among persons involved in the profit-making abortion industry and, maybe saddest of all, among taxpayers who see abortion as a way of keeping down the size of an underclass,” Glendon told Moyers.

“Pro-life has this dark side of punitiveness toward women that I find absolutely incomprehensible, but it seems to be there.”

This lawyer’s ability to see both sides may help avoid confrontations between the Vatican and other countries, particularly the United States, that have marked previous world conferences. Last year’s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo featured bitter fights over abortion-related issues.

At one point in the Cairo conference, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls accused the U.S. delegation of being “anti-family” and “pro-abortion.”

But this year, particularly in the wake of conservative victories in last November’s elections in the United States, the mood in both camps appears aimed at conciliation. Speeches by American officials stress many of the same issues found in the Vatican position, including a campaign against forced abortion and sterilization.

On Wednesday, the Vatican delegation retreated from an expected battle over abortion. And Mrs. Clinton, in her centerpiece speech at the conference on Tuesday, condemned the use of abortion as a birth-control technique while dwelling on motherhood as an occupation with its own economic value--both positions taken by the Catholic Church.

Glendon commented that Mrs. Clinton’s speech was one she could have easily delivered herself.

As Glendon enters negotiations over the complex and controversial wording of the U.N. action plan for women for the rest of this century, she appears ready to pledge the Vatican to a final consensus, providing that the issues of last year’s Cairo meeting are not reopened.

“This conference is about action,” said Glendon. “After all the conferences that have been held since the 1950s, this conference is not about any new commitments. It is about action on the ones that exist.”