Harper’s “help" for women: no abortions, no contraceptives?

UPDATE: Hello to readers from Full Comment. You can find my reply to Kelly's post here:
Kelly McParland and Conservatives: Missing the point on abortion.

When Michael Ignatieff last week called on Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to pledge that access to safe abortion services will be part of the government’s ballyhooed G8 initiative to generate international support for improving maternal and child care in the developing world, he was attacked by the critics.

Even though he was calling for an affirmation of what has been longstanding Canadian development policy under both parties – not to follow the George W. Bush route of tying development funds to personal moral and religious beliefs – Ignatieff was attacked by the critics for raising irrelevancies, for playing politics and trying to politicize the initiative.

It turns out, however, that his fears were far from unfounded. In a story in Embassy Mag (behind a subscriber firewall, but I’ve pasted the relevant sections below) Canadian International Development Minister Bev Oda confirms safe abortions, and even contraception, will not be part of the Conservative push on maternal and child care:

Oda says no abortion, contraceptives support

But the WHO reports that lack of both contributes to unnecessary deaths.

CIDA Minister Bev Oda says the government's child and maternal health strategy will not address unsafe abortions in developing countries or support access to family planning and contraceptives. Rather, she said that to ensure the aid agency remains effective, "it's the lives of mothers and babies that we are focused on."

But with nearly 15 per cent of all maternal deaths being attributed to such abortions, and up to 40 per cent of maternal deaths preventable with access to family planning and contraception, experts and critics say support for these areas is essential.

On Jan. 28, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that rallying support for maternal and child health would be a major focus of Canada's G8 presidency. In developing countries, more than 500,000 women die each year in pregnancy and 9 million children die before the age of five.

(snip)

When asked about support for contraceptives and family planning in an interview last week, Ms. Oda said: "In order to maintain our focus, again our focus is on maternal and child health and mortality rates.

"We want to make sure that mothers, pregnant women, are healthy and can have safe births, and that the birthing process is made safer because if you look at the number of births during the actual birthing process, that's where a number of maternal deaths happen," she added.

"We also want to make sure when babies are born, they are born as healthy as possible so that they can live through their early age, up to the age of five, with as strong and good health as possible."

The decision by the Harper Conservatives to not include addressing abortion safety as part of their effort would seem to question just how sincere their effort to address maternal and child care really is, not to mention how effective it would be, according to the experts:

A recent report from the New York-based Guttmacher Institute found that 20 million unsafe abortions are performed in developing countries each year, and World Health Organization spokeswoman Olivia Lawe-Davies said 68,000 women die because of unsafe abortions said.

"It is also estimated that up to 40 per cent of maternal deaths could be averted with access to family planning or modern contraception," Ms. Lawe-Davies wrote in an email last week.

A recent Amnesty International report said a lack of safe and confidential access to information and modern contraceptive methods in Burkina Faso, for example, has contributed to early and unwanted pregancies as well as life-threatening abortions.

"Family planning is severely underfunded," the report reads, "partly because, until recently, international donors and the government have concentrated on other public health priorities, notably the AIDS pandemic, polio and malaria."

(snip)

Liberal CIDA critic Glen Pearson says a narrow focus on pregnant women doesn't address many of the root problems associated with high maternal death rates in developing countries.

"The whole problem for women in these countries is they have no access to condoms," said Liberal CIDA critic Glen Pearson. "It's a nightmare out there for a woman to be able to just protect herself from even getting pregnant, or once she's pregnant and complications develop, from her going through her own abortion procedure and other things they do. You can't make it about just once the child is in the womb."

The idea of a major push to address maternal and child care is a noble one. But ideology can’t be allowed to dictate the program and the help we’re going to give to women in need. We should listen to the experts on the ground about what is needed and what will be effective to meet the goals we’re trying to achieve and let them direct the resources accordingly.

That has always been the Canadian policy, and if the Conservatives desire to address this challenge is legitimate, it shouldn’t change it now. Sadly, though, it seems that the trend of the Harper Conservatives allowing ideology to guide development and aid decisions is ever expanding.

UPDATE: In this YouTube clip, Conservative backbencher Shelly Glover confirms that, in a reversal of longstanding Canadian policy, safe abortion will not be part of the government program. And conservative anti-abortion groups are claiming credit for the policy reversal, using the clip to encourage donations to the The Harper Party.

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