ProWomanProLife

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.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) acts primarily an advisory council to the European Union, and their recommendations often carry a lot of weight. However, the recent warning from the PACE on the dangers of sex selection may be contrasting to the EU’s very pro-abortion tradition, a tradition the EU may want to reconsider as it negotiates membership for countries like Armenia.

  On October 3, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the “Prenatal sex selection” resolution, which says that the disproportion in sex selection is “alarming” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Albania. [...]

The PACE resolution appeals to “investigate the causes and reasons behind skewed sex ratios at birth; to step up efforts to raise the status of women in society” throughout the whole territory of Armenia. [...]

Doctor-gynecologist at the Armenian-American Mammography Wellness Center Nelly Avagyan’s experience showed that majority of abortions is because of a child’s sex.

“This is an Armenian way of thinking – to have sons by all means, even though abortions of boys are also registered, but the number of aborted girls prevails,” Avagyan says.

Many women in the west believe that choice is their right; they’ve the right to choose abortion. But we live in a world of commodity, a world of economics, where being part of the communal economic stream, those same women also think things like “abortion is good because there are too many children living in poverty.” Women in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad don’t live in this world, and I’m getting pretty frustrated that people keep thinking they do.

…according to Newsweek, “Women have no legal rights in Chad and most marriages are arranged when women are 11 to 12 years old.” [...]

In the aftermath of its devastating civil war, certain parts of Congo continue to be terrorised by militias and rebel armies. Rape, sexual abuse and brutal violence have become common forms of oppression. In a bone-chilling indictment, Newsweek states that “more than 1,100 women are raped in Congo every day”.

So when I read this from the NY Times, I was of course angry that people still don’t realize that in a country where rape is normal, where it occurs regularly, committed by spouses, soldiers, and boyfriends, that abortion for these women could never be a choice. If you live in a country where you have little or no control over your sexual acts, you will certainly have little or no control over your sexual health. To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.

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Andrea adds: I thought Jennifer’s words at the end there were worth repeating, emphasizing. “To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.”

We also fail to pay attention to the fact that for many women living in DRC, while rape is horrible, so too is abortion. Women there may not see it as the “solution” it is presented as in the West.

This article from China actually has a Planned Parenthood director admitting that there is such a thing as “too many” abortions, and that the procedures carry a physical and mental risk to the mother. Read more here.

Among the 8 to 10 million induced abortions performed on the mainland each year, nearly 47 percent involve unmarried women younger than 25, according to Cheng Linan, director of the center for clinical research and training of the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research. […]

A 2008 survey involving more than 50,000 induced abortions in Beijing showed that roughly 70 percent of the women undergoing the procedure were migrants. For many, it was not their first abortion.

According to a nationwide study by the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), of all women having received induced abortions, nearly 56 percent had two operations and 13.5 percent had three or more.

“That not only causes the women certain physical or mental problems, but it also gives the country a huge economic burden of more than 3 billion Yuan” or about $470 million, she said.

Among Chinese women who became infertile, more than 88 percent previously had an induced abortion, a study conducted in 2007 showed.

Other potential health hazards include haemorrhage, uterine or pelvic infection, uterine perforation and cervical laceration.

Though this article argues that more contraception is the answer, another option is of course to educate unmarried young women (especially those that are migrants with distinct socioeconomic burdens) that they aren’t socially obligated to have sex.

Two stories cropped up today from CBC news, and virtually every commentator to these stories was disgruntled to some degree. One is on funding for Planned Parenthood,

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?

…comes legislation for babies with heartbeats. Read more here,

The bill would require a doctor to check for a fetal heartbeat and inform the woman. If there is a detectable heartbeat, an abortion would be prohibited unless there was a risk of death or major injury to the woman’s health. Supporters believe the bill would block tens of thousands of abortions, as a fetal heartbeat can be typically heard around the sixth week of pregnancy, and sometimes as soon as three weeks’ gestation.

Is ignorance really bliss? On June 17 The Guardian ran this article,

In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.

But the funds became entwined in China’s one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming “You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it.”

The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN’s main population agency, in the tyranny of China’s forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in a book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection.

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the article highlights some excellent points, Mara Hvistendahl was unhappy with her books misrepresentation. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UNFPA responded with their own letter refuting the claims of the original article. On July 20, Hvistendahl wrote the following:

I did not argue, furthermore, that the United Nations Population Fund was complicit in these abortions – rather that the agency provided $50m in funding ahead of the one-child policy’s unveiling, and then looked the other way when foreign press reports made clear that forced abortions were occurring. There is a difference between outright funding an injustice and ignoring injustice once it occurs.

UNFPA responded to the article with a letter contesting my supposed claims (Sex selection, China, and human rights, 25 June). The letter may not have been necessary had the article veered more closely to the message of my book.

Sex selection is an important issue, perhaps the most impacting issue on the female population to date, and I just hope that authors and reporters aren’t feeling intimidated because the agencies they’re reporting on are so well financed and multinational. It’s always frustrating to be misquoted, but especially when you just might get a letter from one of the largest agencies in the world.