Wright also questioned whether the summit overlooked the issue of accountability.
"There didn't seem to be concern that accountability ought to include ensuring that there's not coercion," she told CNA. "Those of us who know the dark history of population control are very concerned about this Gates summit."
Wright said the summit's partner organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International and the Population Council were involved in the population control movement, which has had a history of coercion with the poor and uneducated.
One main organizer of the summit, the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, funded a reproductive health program in India that had the goal of making childbirth safer for women and expanding access to family planning. That program now faces charges that it coerced patients.
However, U.K. officials showed a "very lax attitude" about the charge, Wright said.
Associates of the program allegedly sterilized uneducated rural men and women who may not have known what they had agreed to. Participants used soiled sterilization tools and performed sterilizations on pregnant women, causing miscarriages.
Some summit speakers implied that family planning can distract from real problems or cause problems of its own.
Wright said that Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said that his country is still trying to provide electricity for its residents, but pledged $5 million to the family planning effort.
"He almost seemed to be expressing exasperation that the wealthy countries have their latest hobby horse and the developing countries have to follow along, even as they are trying to develop their own countries," Wright said.
The South Korea representative noted that the country began family planning programs in the 1960s but "overdid it' and now faces an underpopulation problem.
The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute said that the International Planned Parenthood Federation organized the NGOs at the summit and excluded any groups critical of the initiative.
(Story continues below)
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Wright herself said abortion advocates at the event recognized her and had a security guard check her credentials on suspicion she had sneaked into the event.
Austin Ruse, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute president criticized that attention.
"This event is highly controlled," he charged. "They want a message coming out of the conference of complete unanimity. The only way to get that is to keep others out."
The family planning summit could prompt further clashes between summit organizers, their sympathizers in governments and the Catholic Church, which recognizes birth control use as sinful.
Melinda Gates, a self-identified Catholic who helped organize the summit, has said she rejects Catholic teaching on birth control and is advocating birth control as a matter of "social justice."
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.