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The ultimate victory for the bishops would be to reverse Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that prevents states from banning abortion before the fetus is viable. But even without that prize, women's choice advocates said the effect the bishops have had on reproductive choice in the U.S. has already been noticeable.

"Women have fewer abortion rights today than we had three or four years ago," O'Neill said. "We are so grateful for our friends in Congress who stopped the Stupak amendment, but ultimately we did see an anti-abortion provision go into health care law, and in 2011 alone we had more than 100 anti-abortion laws signed into law at a state level, which is unprecedented."

O'Neill finds it troubling that a group of men that has historically denied women the opportunity to participate in leadership positions is exercising so much power over such a broad range of women's reproductive health legislation.

"Clearly there's a problem when men take such an interest in the sexual function of women," she said. "There's something deeply off about it."

At the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference, the Vatican delegation held up proceedings for days over the use of the word "gender." The Holy See adheres to a belief that God created men and women as "equal but separate," so that contemporary cultural or social gender analysis is an affront to God's eternal design and leads to dissent over the Pope's infallibly decreed ban on women's ordination.

In the year 2000, this line of thinking might seem merely quaint were it not for the cloak of respectability afforded to these and other reactionary positions by the Vatican's access to the floor of the United Nations. Although it has refused to sign the UN Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women because it reserves the right to discriminate against Catholic women, the Vatican has used various UN bodies to try impose its opinions on female sexuality and health on all the women of the world.

It was the Vatican that led opposition to providing contraception and abortion for women in conflict zones such as Bosnia and Kosovo, where rape was a weapon of war. The Vatican's childless celibates also orchestrated a campaign to cut off funding to UNICEF for the world's most needy children because the agency distributes emergency contraception to teenage girls in war zones.

At a meeting in March to prepare for this week's conference following up on the Beijing session, the tactics of the Holy See and its fundamentalist allies changed from obstruction to intimidation. Priests in full clerical garb, waving rosaries as a weapon to ward off evil spirits, invaded women's caucuses. Some conducted an exorcism in the room where the lesbian caucus had met.

Given this latest rash of outrageous behaviour, a movement known as See Change is building among several non-governmental organizations determined to expose the status of the Holy See to public scrutiny. ...