ProWomanProLife

“Foreign Aid to Mining Firms”

The Harper government recently announced a publicly funded agreement between three of Canada’s mining giants and three of Canada’s leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs). [...]

“The Canadian government is using aid to support the expansion of Canadian mining…[and] to determine development paths inside countries according to the logic of mining companies,” Yao Graham of Third World Network Africa [...]

“CIDA has always worked government-to-government,” said Coumans. “Now what CIDA is doing is channeling Canadian taxpayer money directly to the mine site and basically paying for corporate social responsibility projects, and that is very bizarre.”

What does this mean? It means that mining companies have a bad track record of damaging regions, so now they’ve been paired with groups that usually focus on humanitarian issues/sustainable development and receive government funds. These are the groups we want to build hospitals and make good on the promises we make to foreign countries. Promises that matter so much to us we’re willing to give gobs of money towards them, like lowering maternal death rates and ending child poverty. However with this unusual pairing, these groups are now meant to keep “in check” the mining company, as well as clean up any further damage the mining causes to already needy regions at the taxpayer’s expense. The money moved like a game of three-card Monte, and we’ve taken our eyes off the lady.

It’s hard to think that women and children would be military targets, but for militias and rebel groups operating in the DRC, that’s exactly what they are.

The killings of the civilians took place on Monday and Tuesday in remote villages in the territory of Shabunda, in South Kivu Province, an area still troubled by armed groups more than eight years after the end of a war there. An army spokesman said the 45 victims were mainly women and children, including one pregnant woman, and a leader of a village was decapitated.

There’s a petition to President Obama you can sign here to send an envoy to the region. If you know of something similar in Canada, please let us know.

In 2009 the NY Times reported,

Christine Schuler-DeSchryver, a well-known anti-rape activist, vented about all the empty promises from the stream of high-ranking visitors who have recently come to eastern Congo, “one more important than the next.”

“In the end, all we got was a pile of business cards,” she said.

The Congolese women have been waiting too long for action.

Recently there have been several stories about Marie Stopes’ patients requiring medical aftercare to save women’s lives, some have died before that care was recieved. Their answer to that problem? The organization is urging these women’s home countries to clean up their mess.

WOMEN returning to Ireland after having abortions in the UK put their lives at risk by not seeking adequate aftercare, according to a leading figure at Marie Stopes International.

On Saturday, the General Medical Council struck off Dr Phanuel Dartey after he carried out botched procedures on a number of women, including an Irish patient who became seriously ill after returning home in 2006.

The Ghanaian doctor who worked at the Marie StopesInternational clinic in Ealing, West London, left parts of the foetus inside the Irish patient, which led to her suffering a perforated uterus.

The Marie Stopes clinics, which carry out about 2,700 terminations for Irish women each year, said the case involving Dr Dartey was an “isolated incident” and Tracie McNeill, the group’s international vice president, said one of their main concerns as a healthcare services provider involved Irish patients returning home.

“We are worried that many Irish women are not visiting their GPs to receive any aftercare help.

“Many are too embarrassed and ashamed to tell their own doctors about their termination and it’s not uncommon to hear of some who’ve become ill after going back.

Botched procedures on a number of women are not “isolated incidents”.

In Brazil abortion is not part of the cultural framework, and abortion laws are very restrictive in the country. As a result when children are born with abnormalities, even very extreme abnormalities, we have women and families who warmly welcome these new lives without hesitation. It’s inspiring really. Welcome to the world conjoined twins Emanoel and Jesus.

A Brazilian woman who has given birth to a baby with two heads, admitted she had initially expected twins. [...]

Mr Vasconcelos added that at no point did the mother, who has three other children, appear distraught that her son has two heads.

He said: ‘On the contrary, the baby was received with much happiness by the family.

‘The mother fed both mouths and the baby stayed with her in her room the whole time. Her desire was to take her baby straight home.’

…into the Croydon Day Surgery clinic (now known as Maroondah surgery of Marie Stopes International Australia).

A 42-YEAR-OLD woman died days after attending a controversial abortion clinic in Croydon last week. [...]

It is the fourth investigation involving the clinic in six years.

Anaesthetist James Latham Peters allegedly infected more than 50 women with hepatitis C at the same clinic in 2008 and 2009. Peters, who was bailed on a $200,000 surety, will return to court in May for the remainder of the committal hearing.

The surgery’s owner, Dr Mark Schulberg, was in 2009 found guilty of unprofessional conduct for failing to gain legal consent to perform a late-term abortion on an intellectually disabled woman.

And earlier this year it was revealed that a 40-year-old woman was left fighting for her life in the Box Hill Hospital after Dr Schulberg performed a late-term abortion surgery on her.

I’m not ignoring this story, doing the rounds, I promise, showing that there are no negative mental health effects after abortion. I just feel like with a topic as political as this one, I should read the study before I link to it and have some commentary on what they did or did not do.

I have not yet had the time to do so. But I will say this: This study flies in the face of a great number of other studies indicating precisely the opposite. And I will also add that all those other studies showing abortion does indeed harm a woman’s mental health did not get the press this one is getting.

My beef is with the media for quickly picking up on this story, while concealing other studies that show the opposite outcome. They think they are being “feminist” or woman-friendly by reporting this story, because they are “pro-choice” but in fact what they are doing has quite the opposite effect. Since so many women do indeed suffer after their abortions, this type of press tells them their suffering is unwarranted and that there is something wrong with them for feeling bad.

This is not to say that every woman feels bad after an abortion. Some don’t. But for every one woman who doesn’t, there’s a defensive woman who, quite frankly, hasn’t quite processed what she’s done, and then there are, of course, those who truly do feel bad and suffer suicide, suicide ideation, increased drug and alcohol use, etc.

I’m sure we could get to a point where no woman ever felt bad about her abortion. This is fully possible. But is it desirable? Would this not mean a distancing from our own selves? A truly clinical approach to something so intimate and personal is not the direction we want to go. I’m not asking for women to feel bad, no. I’m asking for them to be empowered enough that they wouldn’t make the decisions that leave them with lousy decisions in the first place.

All of these ideas on what it means to be a truly strong woman, one who is confident, bold, assertive and makes good decisions as a result is whispering into the wind when it comes to the media who are stuck on the notion that apparently there is an “undo” button for sex. Which there isn’t. Sex isn’t a recreational activity–therefore the outcomes of poor choices–babies or killing said babies–aren’t recreational either. A lack of poor mental health after killing your baby is possible, but wholly undesirable. When we truly reach that stage where studies return this outcome based on good research methodology, we’ll have a lot more than abortion to worry about.

Think the UN made abortion a human right? Think again.

 It is now commonplace that people around the world are told there is a new international right to abortion.

Those who receive this message are people who have the power to change abortion laws; parliamentarians, lawyers, judges and others.
Those delivering this message are influential and believable people; UN personnel, human rights lawyers, judges and others.

The assertion they make is false. No UN treaty makes abortion an international human right.

So the San Jose Articles were born, as a tool to help countries and their citizens stand up to these false claims. Read them, print them, reference them, and pass them along.

Recently, there has been a lot of debate around the national population growth in Canada, many people fearing that there simply aren’t enough Canadians (and nowhere near enough Nova Scotians), once populated industrial towns now only operate senior centres. For me, these are negatve arguments to make, as they make me feel like part of the GDP and less like a human being. I’ve heard the statistic of 2.1 children needed for every fertile female, and this insinuates that I have a social, dare I say patriotic, obligation to have at least that many. Conversely, I don’t want to be told that the fewer children I have, the better it is for the world. This too turns my reproductivity into a social and patriotic act, a duty and a commodity. But of course, we aren’t saying both of these things to Canadian women, we’re saying a little more here, and a little less there.

Yes, of course, the developed world should decrease its consumption – and the co-benefit of providing women with services to avoid unwanted pregnancies is particularly large in the UK because of its high per capita emissions. But does she realise that a reduction of 8-15% in carbon emissions can be obtained by providing family planning to all women who want it. This reduction would be equivalent to stopping all deforestation, or increasing the world’s use of wind power 40-fold.

Here, the writer is speaking about those poorer regions of our world. Those who she claims “want” family planning but don’t have it. I would like to point out, that most of the women I have heard interviewed from those poorer countries don’t want to keep getting pregnant but are never asked if they want to have as much sex as they’re having. Many want something they can hide, keep secret from partners etc. This, to me, illustrates that it’s not a family planning issue so much as a women’s rights issue. Shouldn’t they have the freedom to say no to sex? Should we really be giving them contraception and telling them to stop having children, in the name of having a little less there and a little more here?

We often hear in Canada that we don’t want to debate those pesky moral issues. Morality is viewed as a bad word in political debate.

Here’s what happens without it though:

From The Washington Post,

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday returned to an abortion issue that nearly sank President Barack Obama’s health care law last year with legislation that bars an insurance plan regulated under the new law from covering abortion if any of its customers receive federal subsidies.

Providers that offer abortion coverage would have to set up identical plans without abortion coverage to participate in the health insurance exchanges to be set up under the new law.