Canada will fund an organization that provides family planning services around the world — but only in countries where abortion is illegal in most cases, CBC News has learned.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has decided to approve a proposal by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to provide sex education and contraception in five developing countries.

…and the other concerns funding for maternal and child health projects.

Canada has selected 28 maternal and child health projects to share $82 million in funding between now and 2016, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Tuesday.

The money was committed in the G-8 Muskoka Initiative, 15 months ago. It brings the total allocated under the fund to almost $740 million for projects in Africa, the Americas and Asia.

What are your views on these proposals?

Single mothers are still more likely to be employed than married mothers, for the obvious reason that they depend more heavily on their own earnings. But it’s harder for them to find jobs, in part because they find it harder to make child-care arrangements.

Unemployment rates among single mothers have long surpassed those among married men and women. In 2010, their unemployment rate averaged 14.6 percent, compared with 6.8 percent among married men and 6.3 percent among married mothers.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research emphasizes that women have historically had less access than men to unemployment benefits. Most states restrict eligibility to those who experience involuntary job loss and exclude those who quit for reasons such as loss of child-care assistance or the need to tend to a sick family member. Until recently, most states excluded part-time workers from coverage.

Today’s conflict is again over health care, with the headlining debate over defunding Planned Parenthood. Though this is a meager, financially speaking, part of the proposed 2011 budget cuts, it has a heavy emotional weight with the voting population. Last night, it was proposed that the Planned Parenthood rider be separated from the budget proposal.

Durbin later qualified his statement. He told reporters that negotiators had mulled the possibility of separating the Planned Parenthood rider. He said he did not know whether House Republicans would accept the compromise.

“We’re hoping,” he said. “[There’s] a procedural way to deal with that.”

Last year, $75 million of Title X funding went to Planned Parenthood affiliates, which Republicans object to and attempted or are attempting to remove from the fiscal year 2011 budget. Planned Parenthood provides abortion services but can’t use federal money for them. Republicans argue there’s no real way to segregate the private dollars dedicated to abortion services and the federal dollars backing other areas of care.

That disagreement was major stumbling block in negotiations for most of Thursday and Friday.

No one wants a shutdown, but I don’t want the funding issue to be put on the back burner either. While it’s not a lot of money in federal terms, the principal idea is certainly not democratic. Planned Parenthood receives federal money to provide a service that the federal government should really be providing themselves in order to allow citizens the shape the service. Some states have had success in regulating Planned Parenthood, while others have been threatened with costly lawsuits and have been unable to “have their say” about clinic procedures, even though their citizens’ tax dollars are funding the organization. There’s something fundamentally wrong about that. I don’t want a shutdown, but I don’t want to stop talking about Planned Parenthood.

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — There’s more bad news in the cards for Romania’s beleaguered witches.

A month after Romanian authorities began taxing them for their trade, the country’s soothsayers and fortune tellers are cursing a new bill that threatens fines or even prison if their predictions don’t come true.

Superstition is a serious matter in the land of Dracula, and officials have turned to witches to help the recession-hit country collect more money and crack down on tax evasion.

In January, the government changed labor laws to officially recognize the centuries-old practice of witchcraft as a taxable profession, prompting angry witches to dump poisonous mandrake into the Danube in an attempt to put a hex on them.

[...]

The new bill would also require witches to have a permit, to provide their customers with receipts and bar them from practicing near schools and churches.

SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Chevron Corp. said Tuesday that it has hit oil in two wells in the Atlantic Ocean about 40 miles off the coast of the Republic of Congo.

The wells, in 2,600 feet of water, were drilled to about 6,000 feet, and each was tested and oil flowed, the company said in a statement.

“These discoveries further demonstrate the potential of West Africa where Chevron has made significant investments to develop new energy resources,” company Vice Chairman George Kirkland said.

The wells are in the Moho-Bilondo permit area. A Chevron subsidiary holds a 31.5 percent stake in the permit area and is in a partnership with Société Nationale des Pétroles du Congo and Total E&P Congo.

This should be good news, and for countries like the US and Canada, finding oil is hitting the jackpot, but the DRC suffers from previously having mortgaged off the majority of its oil profits to the French company Elf Aquitaine.

In the early 1980s Congo received over a billion dollars a year in oil revenue. And yet there was no corresponding economic development during the same period.

The oil earnings were used to fund a huge expansion in imports to meet the ever-increasing demand for wheat and cheap rice, maize and frozen meat.

Back to basics

The civil service swelled beyond all recognition, increasing from 3,300 employees in 1960 to 80,000 employees in the 1990s. The payment of salaries took up a significant proportion of the budget, while the expenditure on rural development dropped.

The rural population resorted to hunting wild animals and subsistence production of manioc, while the percent age of land under cultivation fell to only 2%.

[...]

While the politicians got rich, the budget suffered from deficits, and Elf was approached to lend money to sort out the mess. Naturally, the company obliged, but at high rates of interest that only added to Congo’s problems in the long term. The debts were (and still are) repaid at source, in the oil that Elf was extracting, which was valued at a fraction of its real worth.

The oil-backed loans caught Congo in a trap of inescapable poverty. The more the politicians borrowed, the more oil was taken by the multinationals at source in exchange for debt repayment.

In a country desperate for infrastructure and stricken by sexual violence and poverty, being stuck in this crediting limbo is something of a life sentence for the Congolese women. When we look for solutions in the region, like in a Jane Austen novel, economics can never be left out of the conversation.

Remember that revolutionary slogan, “No taxation without representation!” Well, for many people, that tyranny is just what happens with each and every paycheque. Organizations, like Planned Parenthood, have received billions of tax payer dollars over the past 20 years.

As my pro-choice friend once told me, “It’s okay if you’re pro-life, so long as you don’t object to anyone else having an abortion.” Even with this flawed logic it’s clear, even to pro-choice individuals, that the large population who object in the US and in Canada shouldn’t be paying for the procedure.

From Minnesota,

The people of Minnesota have never voted to pay for abortions with state money, and neither has the state Legislature. Taxpayer funding of abortion was imposed upon us by a wrongly decided court case known as Doe vs. Gomez in the mid-1990s.

Now it is time for the Legislature to represent the will of the people by passing a ban on taxpayer-funded abortions, and for Gov. Mark Dayton to allow the ban to become law. We know that Gov. Dayton supports abortion; he always has. But many who consider themselves “pro-choice” acknowledge that using tax dollars to pay for elective abortions goes too far.

Funding abortion seems especially unwise at a time when the state faces a massive $6.5 billion deficit. Paying abortionists to kill unborn Minnesotans is an expense that we simply cannot afford, and that unborn babies can live without.

According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, taxpayers bought 50,869 abortions at a cost of $15.6 million between July of 1994 and December of 2008.

[...]

I know the argument will be made by the other side that poor women ought to have the same access to abortion as rich women. But if we really want what’s best for disadvantaged mothers and their babies, we will help them, not offer them abortions.

______________________

Brigitte wonders: Am I the only one who noticed the slogan buried in this story? “Abortion: An expense unborn babies can live without.”

London – “The global hormonal contraceptive market is a fast growing market, with oral contraceptives considered to be the most common method of avoiding unplanned pregnancies by women. In 2009, the global contraceptives market was $11.2 billion and is forecast to grow to $14.5 billion by 2016, which represents a growth rate of 4% between 2009 and 2016.”

You can’t find reports like this on Men’s Health Markets, because they don’t exist. Sure, there are reports on Viagra revenues, but nothing to the extent of a Contraceptives Market report. $14.5 billion makes that Facebook kid look like a bellhop, and it’s not an amount the major pharmaceutical players are willing to part with easily. New growth is on the way, with new players vying for their piece of the birth control pie. What can we expect? More ads, new forms of contraceptives, and all of this at a record pace. We can also expect more of the same in terms of real consideration for women’s health.

Hundreds of women have become pregnant after a long-term contraceptive implant failed, it emerged last night.

Even more have complained that they were left injured or scarred by the rod inserted into their arm, which was supposed to protect them against conceiving for three years.

The NHS has had to pay compensation to women hurt when the implants were inserted and seven women who were left traumatised by unexpectedly becoming pregnant have received payouts totalling more than £200,000 – an average of more than £28,000 each.

A lawyer revealed that many of the women affected had suffered ‘psychological difficulties’, had miscarriages or decided to undergo abortions after the implants went wrong.

One woman who became pregnant and underwent an abortion said the trauma had led to her marriage ending.

The fiasco involving the implant, called Implanon, is one of the worst mass contraceptive failures to hit the NHS in living memory.

A total of 584 women who had the hormone-filled rod inserted in their arms have reported unwanted pregnancies to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency – the Government’s drugs and medical devices watchdog.

But the total could be far higher, as many women may not have complained after becoming pregnant and either undergoing abortions or giving birth.

The MHRA received 1,607 complaints about the implant going wrong, some from doctors deeply concerned that the devices are difficult to insert and that it is impossible to check if they are correctly installed because they are invisible to X-rays.

Implanon’s manufacturer MSD, a subsidiary of global pharmaceutical giant Merck, has now replaced it with an updated product called Nexplanon, which has a new pre-loaded applicator and can be detected by X-ray or CT scan.

I know when I use a product that injures me and fails miserably that I’m certainly not going back for a refill from the same supplier. Merck, hmm, why does that name sound so very familiar? MSD are not the only giants scampering to release new product, Bayer (partnered with the IPPF) is also looking toward the next big market.

Objectives of Bayer’s Sustainability Program

Lighthouse project “Family Planning”

• Introduce original contraception products at prices in line with the market in 11 African countries jointly with USAID by 2012
• Double current family planning activities in collaboration with our partners (e.g. USAID, UNFPA, IPPF) by 2012
• Increase annual provision of oral contraceptives to 110 million cycles jointly with partners (e.g. USAID)

The pipeline looks something like this: A projection of $14.5 billion in contraceptive revenue is made, companies push to produce, approve and market the next big drug, Bayer sends out a “Youth Truck” to assess the prospective customers and get Ugandan children familiar with the idea of prescription birth control (while women in the west see more and more ads), and Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes have their clinics, those philanthropic beacons of family planning, write the prescriptions. At what point are we going to realize that women’s health may not be at the forefront of their priorities?

Of course, niche marketing is nothing new. Focusing on specific demographics – women between the ages of 20 and 30, say, or gray-haired men who play baseball – is an enormous part of how marketing is done.  But the latest such trend has some people seriously worried – and for good reason.

On October 30, marketing executives from companies like Pepsico, Ogilvy & Mather, and Best Buy will convene to absorb the wisdom of speakers like Safaa Zarzour, Secretary General of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization withknown affiliations to terror groups like Hamas. The goal: to raise awareness of the buying power of the Muslim market, and to encourage sharia-compliant branding through the creation of halal products–products which conform to the tenets of sharia (Islamic) law.  (Though usually understood to refer to meat, “halal-compliance” can include other foods, as well as bath products and even clothing.)

Is this smart?

Ogilvy & Mather think so, as do many corporate giants: KFC has introduced halal chicken in many of its U.K. franchises, and Campbell’s recently introduced a halal-compliant soup (are you listening, Andy Warhol?).  Other companies on the halal bandwagon include Nestlé (one of the pioneers in the market), Domino’s, and Subway. According to the Web site for the October 30 American Muslim Consumers Conference(AMCC), “the consumer preferences of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion Muslims are faith-based, and largely non-negotiable.”

[...]

* Jews who follow kosher laws may not consume halal foods, which are blessed with a prayer to Allah. Sharia-compliant Muslims, however (despite the AMCC claims that they can eat nothing that is not halal), are in fact permitted to consume kosher foods, providing that they otherwise conform to halal rules, such as being all-natural and alcohol-free.

It just goes to show that when we’re talking about marketing, whether it’s chicken or sexual health, providers care very little about the social impacts so long as it doesn’t effect their bottom line.

But then, mothers have children. True, children tend not to help with one’s financial situation, at least not while they’re very young. But maybe there’s more to the work-life balance than a big paycheque?

The Canada Revenue Agency has given up on any further action against abortion protester David Little.

Little, who has spent the last few years moving back and forth between P.E.I. and New Brunswick, has refused to file tax returns since 2000 in protest of government-funded abortions. He was due in court in Fredericton this week to face a charge of refusing a court order to file them.

Little was found guilty in 2007 on three counts of failing to file, and eventually was sentenced to 66 days in jail for refusing to pay the $3,000 fine. He believes it’s his religious right to refuse to pay taxes because he doesn’t want his money funding abortions.

Now, I realize my tax dollars fund many wonderful things, and I realize I’m not in the position to stop paying them. However, there are a few things I can do to fund the pro life cause in an attempt to level the playing field.

When raising funds for Chernobyl Lifeline in Ireland, we would offer businesses a certificate to hang on their entrance stating they were supporters of the organization. Shoppers, especially in small communities, were more willing to part with their hard earned money when they felt they were supporting a good cause. Recently, I came across an ad for Real Estate for Life online, which had me wondering what other pro life and pro woman companies were out there. (Steve Jobs made me a loyal customer when he took a stand against pornography in the App Store.)

With a little research, you can find your own local pro life businesses (on-line directories, church bulletins, billboards, yellow pages etc.). If you look for the pro life certificate hanging in the window, you’ll be surprised just how many are out there. So while you may not want to stop paying your taxes, you can support the cause by becoming an educated consumer.