Washington ? The Bush administration is pressing its opposition to abortion rights overseas by trying to strip references to reproductive health care from a 1994 international population-control agreement, according to activists on both sides of the issue.

State Department officials attending a United Nations conference Friday in Bangkok, Thailand, urged delegates of more than 30 nations to remove the terms “reproductive rights” and “reproductive health services” from the agreement, which established reproductive health care as a means to stem population growth, observers said.

The Bush administration says rights to “reproductive health services” could include rights to abortion. Abortion rights advocates deny this. They say the agreement doesn’t promote abortion as a means of family planning and that it says only that abortion must be safe in countries where it is legal.

So far, no other nation has joined the American effort to alter the “plan of action” adopted in Cairo, Egypt, by the United States and 178 other nations.

“The U.S. determined at the beginning of the Bush administration that they did not want to agree to certain things that the Clinton administration agreed to in international documents, particularly things dealing with abortion,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a U.N. watchdog group that opposes abortion. “What the U.S. is trying to do is to ensure that reproductive health and reproductive health services do not include abortion.”

Ruse said developing countries looked to the U.N. document to help craft abortion laws.

A memo from State Department officials to their counterparts in other countries says the United States is not backing away from the Cairo agreement, but that “we will not reaffirm, or accept, language which supports or promotes abortion.” Negotiations among higher-level officials will continue during the next few days at the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference.

Last month, a State Department official who was attending a preparatory meeting for this conference said the United States wouldn’t reaffirm its support for the document because of the references to reproductive health. Later, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States wasn’t backing off the agreement, and added that the administration supports “reproductive health,” particularly reducing mortality rates for mothers and infants and promoting education.

The State Department did not comment further Friday.

Abortion-rights advocates contend that changing the language would undercut the international community’s approach to population control and hurt women’s health in developing nations.

The controversy represents the administration’s latest attempt to instill its anti-abortion view in international policy. Earlier this year, the administration eliminated America’s $34 million 2002 contribution to the United Nations’ family planning program and led a fight to remove references to “reproductive services” from a U.N. document on children.