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One memo said the CRR international legal program's "overarching goal is to ensure that governments worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of an understanding that they are bound to do so."

'Sexual rights'

In a current CRR document, available on its website, the group hails as a promising development the fact that six U.N. human rights bodies now acknowledge "sexual and reproductive rights."

They are the Committee against Torture, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, and the Human Rights Committee.

"Most [of those treaty-monitoring bodies] now routinely recommend that governments take action to ensure sexual and reproductive rights for women, thus removing any doubt that these rights are protected in binding human rights treaties," CRR says.

According to the website of the International Women's Health Coalition, "sexual rights" include the right to access "safe abortion" along with other things, including the right to contraception and the right to say no to violence, rape, abuse or forced marriage.

In his opening remarks to the New York meeting Monday, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke of the need to "guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights," according to a transcript on the U.N. website.

In her press conference later, Sauerbrey pointed to the use in U.N. documents of the undefined term "sexual rights" and noted that Annan had used it earlier in the day.

"There is no fundamental right to abortion," she said. "And yet it keeps coming up, largely driven by NGOs trying to hijack the term and trying to make it into a definition."

'Emphasize marriage and family'

The U.S. government disputes NGOs' accusations about its policies harming women.

It plans to introduce two resolutions at the conference, on empowering women economically and on sex trafficking and prostitution.

"Achieving global respect for women is a U.S. foreign policy imperative," Undersecretary for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky said in a statement prepared for the conference.

Dobriansky cited the situation in Afghanistan, where millions of women were able to vote in the country's first-ever free presidential election last October.

Dobriansky also pointed to other areas, including education and literacy training, loans for aspiring women entrepreneurs, maternal and child health care programs, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment centers and anti-trafficking projects.

Warning that the meeting in New York could be "sidelined into discussions largely unrelated to the everyday welfare of women," Heritage Foundation domestic policy scholars Jennifer A. Marshall, Melissa G. Pardue and Grace V. Smith said the U.S. should focus on the importance of the family and marriage.

"In general the Beijing documents appear to pay lip service to the concepts of family and marriage, but they offer no convincing policy solutions that will strengthen or promote either institution," they said in an article published Monday.

"The U.S. contribution to this discussion should incorporate the vital role of strong families in reducing a whole host of social ills. The U.S. Department of State should work to build an alliance of family-friendly nations that will work together to support and uphold the value and importance of family and marriage."

A new report by the World Bank said that in 10 years since the Beijing conference, there was evidence that "the lives of women and girls around the world have, on average, improved, due in part to concerted action by the international community and national governments."

It referred in particular to improvements in female education levels; life expectancy for women in developing countries; women's participation in the labor force; and women's property and inheritance rights in parts of Latin America and Asia.

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