NEW YORK, March 3 – The U.S. delegation to a UN session on women’s status today withdrew part the controversial language it has been trying to add to a global consensus policy statement. Women’s leaders immediately welcomed the action as a good first step but insisted that the United States should withdraw the rest of its proposal as well.

The original U.S. amendment to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) draft Declaration reaffirmed the Platform for Action documents of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, which took place in Beijing, but specified “that they do not create any new international human rights, and that they do not include the right to abortion.” At an informal meeting of delegate states today, Ellen Sauerbrey, U.S. Ambassador to the CSW, withdrew the final clause on abortion.

More than 170 women’s groups gathered here had denounced the proposed amendment earlier this week as injecting U.S. domestic politics into a decade-old international consensus, and as an unnecessary distraction from the conference task of reinvigorating efforts to implement the Beijing consensus.