President Bush won the White House on a platform of “compassionate conservatism.” During this Christmas season, I’ve been trying to figure out just what that slogan means.

On the domestic front, most Bush pledges to help the disadvantaged — from expansion of the AmeriCorps volunteer program to health-care tax credits to expansion of low-income housing — have yet to be translated into legislative action.

But overseas, the gap between compassionate rhetoric and action is even more glaring.

That gap was in full view at a U.N. family planning conference in Bangkok last week. The conference was called to strengthen the commitment to the goals of a landmark family planning accord reached in 1994 in Cairo. This agreement called for improving women’s legal and economic status, as well as expanding their rights to reproductive health care and services. The 30 nations represented in Bangkok, including China and India, also wanted to focus on ways to check the explosive spread of HIV/AIDS in Asia.

Instead, the conference was hijacked by a U.S. delegation fixated on three issues: changing the Cairo language, which it claimed advanced abortion, and promoting “natural” family planning along with abstinence for youth. The rest of the conferees were infuriated by U.S. tactics and rejected the proposals by votes of 31-1 and 32-1.

To set the record straight: The Cairo conference accord does not advocate abortion. Just the opposite: Its action program states bluntly that abortion should never be promoted as a method of family planning. But the U.S. team, including John Klink, who formerly worked as an adviser to the Vatican, didn’t seem interested in such realities. Instead, it pushed an ideological agenda that seemed oblivious to the population problems of the developing world.

Example: One American delegate went on in great detail about how women could avoid pregnancy by limiting sex to the right times of month if they were properly equipped with thermometers.

Excuse me. That’s fine for religious Americans in a country where you can do what you choose.

But can you imagine a Pakistani Muslim peasant woman holding up a thermometer to her husband and saying, “Sorry, not tonight”? Or an illiterate Indian woman whose mother-in-law is ready to immolate her for not having sons? Or an African woman, whose truck driver husband is HIV-positive and demands sex?

As for promoting youthful abstinence, again fine, as one option for American or foreign teens.

But how can you rule out sex education and condom distribution in Africa, where taboos on discussing sex leave youngsters ignorant about the cause of AIDS? Or in South Africa, where older men force themselves on teenage virgins in the belief that this cures AIDS? Or in India, where girls are forced into marriage at puberty, or forced into prostitution by desperately poor parents? Or in AIDS-ravaged Asia, where unprotected sex can mean death?

Why shouldn’t such girls have access to sex education and free condoms — and why shouldn’t compassionate American conservatives want to help them before unwanted pregnancies force them to seek abortions?

Two possible explanations come to mind.

One relies on the critique laid out by John DiIulio, the former head of the White House office of faith-based initiatives. He quit his post because he felt the administration’s compassion agenda was meant only to corral votes, not to be enacted. If he’s right, the administration may be courting religious conservatives by letting them pursue a crusade against contraception and women’s rights abroad — rather than at home, which would offend Republican moderates.

A second explanation is that the president is truly compassionate when he calls for a battle against HIV/AIDS and more rights for poor women. But he doesn’t understand the implications of his policies.

Perhaps he doesn’t realize that recent cuts in U.S. funds for the U.N. Family Planning Agency — based on specious charges that the agency supported forced abortions in China — will only increase abortions and AIDS cases. Perhaps he doesn’t know that his team in Bangkok wanted to cut the term “reproductive rights” from the Cairo document, undermining women’s rights to lifesaving family-planning services.

Too bad the president had to cancel his forthcoming trip to Africa to prepare for an Iraq war. He might have heard from some African women about how uncompassionate his policies are.

— Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her e-mail address is trubinphillynews.com.