Little noticed in President Obama’s speech yesterday to Muslims was a muted echo of another historic event that took place in Cairo — the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development.

It was at that U.N. conference that the abortion lobby formally joined forces with the population control lobby, welding the abortion agenda with population control under the mantra of “reproductive rights.”

Ever since, leading U.N. agencies (especially the United Nations Population Fund) have pushed for recognition in international law of “reproductive rights” and the related term “reproductive health.” Generally, these U.N. agencies and their allies at the United Nations pretend these terms aren’t euphemisms for the promotion of abortion. Occasionally, the mask slips, however, as it did in April when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted before Congress that the two terms do indeed refer to access to abortion.

Obama was not so indiscreet as to refer directly to “reproductive rights” or “reproductive health” in his own speech yesterday to Muslims, who are resistant to the imposition of on-demand abortion on their societies. But Clinton’s remarks before Congress were an affirmation that his administration is fully committed to the utilization of these terms as a mechanism for forcing legal abortion on unwilling developing countries who reject it.

So where in yesterday’s speech was the echo of the 1994 Cairo conference? In Obama’s promise that the United States “will also expand partnerships with Muslim communities to promote child and maternal health.”

As in the case of “reproductive health,” U.N. agencies have made use of “child health” and “maternal health” as vectors to promote access to abortion. The linkage has been especially clear in the area of maternal health, where U.N. agencies routinely claim that deaths due to illegal abortion are one of the leading health issues faced by mothers — basing this claim on an inflated estimate of annual deaths of women that is completely unverifiable, according to the U.N.’s former chief demographer.

Given this international history of manipulation of concepts related to “health,” Muslim nations would be well advised to scrutinize any and all new “child and maternal” health programs on offer from the Obama administration.