The Rio+20 conference which had in attendance  world leaders, whose aim of coming together was to see how poverty can be  reduced, social equality advanced and ensure environmental protection on an ever-crowded planet to get to the future desired. Within this conference was the agitation of some of the world’s most powerful women for  women’s rights. TOLUWANI OLAMITOKE examines the core of their grudges against their male counterparts. Excerpts:

THE one week United Nations conference, the   Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development  which held in  Rio, Brazil  twenty years after the Earth Summit in the same city in  1992, ended last  week   Friday,  with  some of the world's  most powerful women, including United States  Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff,  lamenting  the omission of women's reproductive rights in the Rio+20 summit's final statement.

Reproductive rights include a woman's right to decide the number, timing and spacing of children, the right to voluntarily marry and establish a family, as well as the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

The issue was a major bone of contention at the three-day UN summit on sustainable development, which  had  91 United Nations  members set to adopt a weak compromise statement on a roadmap to a green economy.

A reference to reproductive rights was included in the original summit draft, but it was dropped in the final version approved by negotiators.

In her address to the summit, Clinton insisted that "women are essential drivers of sustainable development."

"I applaud the bold call to action issued here in Rio by UN women and likewise the Rio+20 outcome document devotes a strong section to expanding opportunities for women," she said.

She welcomed the fact that the document "endorses sexual and reproductive health and universal access to family planning."

But she made it  clear that "to reach our goals on sustainable development, we also have to ensure women's reproductive rights."

"Women must be empowered to make decisions about whether and when to have children," the US chief diplomat said, adding that Washington would continue to work "to ensure that those rights are respected in international agreements.”

"I would have liked to see the importance of reproductive rights acknowledged in the outcome from Rio+20," Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt also said  in her own address to the summit.

The Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, the summit host, and other stateswomen also spoke in support of reproductive rights at a women's mini-summit on the sidelines of the Rio+20 conference.

"In Brazil, we are investing to overcome difficulties and precarity in access to public health services, with the full exercise of sexual and reproductive rights," said Rousseff, a 64-year-old former marxist guerilla.

Former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson, present at Rio+20 as a representative of "The Elders," a group of former leaders set up by South Africa's Nelson Mandela, meanwhile lashed out at the Vatican's opposition to reproductive rights.

"What do single men know about life, health and the decisions of poor women?" Robinson said in an interview with  a Brazilian popular daily nespaper.

Cardinal Odilo Scherer, the Vatican's representative used his address to the summit to warn that the "promotion of a certain conception of health deeply threatens the dignity of the human person" and amounts to a "death sentence."

"It is scandalous that again a male-dominated gathering wants to dictate to women of the world how they control their bodies," said Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International.

"Rio+20 betrayed women," shouted several activists.

The summit's final document stresses the need to work "toward universal access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning, as this is essential for women's health and advancing gender equality.”