…means so much more than hospitals. From the BBC:

“…this year is the moment when the world will decide where to spend tens of billions of pounds over the next five years in the push towards the MDGs.”

[…]

But Dr Horton said it was “outrageous” that the latest investment announced by the Gates Foundation would not fund abortion services.

He added: “Unsafe abortion contributes to one in seven maternal deaths across the world. These women are already stigmatised, and they shouldn’t be ignored.”

My thoughts exactly! However, what Dr. Horton fails to see is that precisely by creating the space for abortion to become routine while not addressing the fundamental issues, we are ignoring these women. After all, it’s not the unborn child that enables the stigmatization.

Why, you might ask, would women go to such desperate lengths to have an abortion? For many young women, the cultural stigma of being an unwed mother is so strong that they will go to any length to avoid bringing shame and disgrace to their families.
A few years ago, a family friend committed suicide because her boyfriend had disowned the five-month-old foetus burgeoning within her womb. In her note to her parents she stated it would be better to die than bring humiliation to their Christian name.
Inherent in this cultural stigma is often the desertion of the partner or male responsible for the pregnancy, thus relegating the woman to position of a single mother.

Therefore the fear of single motherhood leads to unsafe abortions. A fear stronger than the desire to preserve life, even their own. Why? Because it’s not ideal, it’s not socially acceptable, and it’s not easy. It is essential, then, not only to provide these women with access to safe and hygienic medical care but to bring about a social change that will acknowledge these women as deserving of the dignity that can empower them with the strength and social support to become mothers, even in the least ideal of circumstances. Maternal health means so much more than hospitals, but they’re a good place to start.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is calling for action and funding at the starting line. The simple goal? Getting women in developing nations healthy:

“Some simple blood tests, consultation with a doctor and qualified help at the birth itself can make a huge difference,” Mr. Ban said in an address to an international conference in Washington aimed at finding solutions to problems affecting women and girls worldwide.

“Add some basic antibiotics, blood transfusions and a safe operating room, and the risk of death can almost be eliminated,” he told delegates attending the gathering known as the “Women Deliver” conference.

Though Ban is surrounded by abortion right’s activists, he is nonetheless a diplomat who doesn’t want to identify himself as pro-abortion.

None of the new Gates money will go to fund abortions, Gates said, and the U.N. has no official position on abortion other than to support its safety where legal, Ban explained.

While I feel I will disagree with Ban Ki-Moon in the long run, I can back his desire to get things started with the basics and avoid any delays in providing this service.

For me, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a longstanding example of why abortion simply doesn’t solve any problems for the women of Africa. As we in the west debate the maternal health initiative, the Congolese women are supporting themselves and each other by any means necessary in otherwise insurmountable conditions.

Theirs is the stigmatized sorority of rape.

Behind these courtyard walls at Heal Africa, they’ve found a sanctuary and femaled a village of the otherwise damned.

Erased as wives and daughters for a crime done to them, they’ve been cast out from their homes, expelled from their hamlets, reviled by husbands and fathers and brothers, ostracized by neighbours

There is a fundamental problem in the DR Congo. It’s not lack of ‘access’ that plagues the lives of these women, but it’s that they are abused then shunned because of it. Often severely injured, women of rape are not welcome in their own homes or even the homes of relatives, so with no one left to turn to, these women have erected their own communities, safe havens, from the rubble of war and systemized abuse.

It was through the assistance of a local “listening house” — a network of counselling shelters that functions also as an underground railroad for disenfranchised rape victims — that Ushindi made her way to the central Heal Africa establishment in the North Kivu capital.

These women, some trained as counsellors, and their children, conceived through rape, now occupy the 28 safe houses HEAL Africa has provided.

When the subject of abortion is raised, if she’d ever considered ridding herself of the fetus, Ushindi gasps. Not only is the procedure illegal in the Congo — except when the mother’s physical health is endangered — but she, like the majority of Congolese, is Catholic, not the pick-and-choose kind either.

“That would be killing. There is already so much killing in my country. An abortion would make me just another killer, like the soldiers.”

HEAL Africa is not only providing safe houses and care but also works to combat gender and justice issues that are ultimately at the core of the mistreatment of the Congolese women.

HEAL Africa’s hospital and community development work address the root causes of illness and poverty for the people of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The hospital and the 28 women’s houses in Maniema and North Kivu have provided a safe place for many victims of the war, and have been a motor for combating poverty and promoting community cohesion over the past 14 years.

While HEAL Africa is doing all of the right things to empower women, it is all the more imperative that the G8 initiative works to preserve the goals and ideals of such organizations and allows them access to much needed funding without abortion agendas.

From the UK.

DOZENS of young women are having abortions on the NHS after expensive IVF treatment because they have changed their minds about becoming a mother.

Some terminate pregnancies after splitting from their husband or boyfriend, others because they were pressured into starting a family. The phenomenon is worrying doctors and has triggered a backlash from family campaigners who accuse the women of treating babies like “designer goods”.

During a fervent storm of figures related to the maternal health initiative, the Lancet study brings good news.

With the best methods possible, the Lancet study shows that maternal deaths have declined since 1980 from more than a half-million annually to 342,900. That’s without abortion being declared an international right and without $30 billion additional funding for family-planning groups.

Abortion activists have been storming Capitol Hill, citing the discredited figures and reciting the mantra that abortion rights will lower global maternal deaths. At one briefing, speakers demanded U.S. funding of international abortions because “public funding of abortion is a human right.”

A right abortion activists declare, for the sake of funding, is necessary to further reduce the claimed 13 percent of women who die annually from unsafe abortions. So while we’re talking about numbers, here’s a follow-up to the Margaret Somerville article stating she’s exaggerating the numbers for the other side.

She deduces that there are at least 800 late-term abortions carried out in Canada each year, which amounts to less than 0.3 per cent of live births, a miniscule [sic] figure she nonetheless seems to think puts paid to the myth that they are “not rare.”

She then claims that pregnancy complications that threaten the mother’s health and well being are, in fact, “rare.” Canada’s maternal death rate is eight out of 1,000 births. Our late-term abortion rate, by the most generous extrapolation of Somerville’s numbers, is about half that, yet somehow “not rare.”

When I hear a number like 0.3 percent, I think to myself, that’s not as significant as the 13 percent of maternal deaths we’re told are from unsafe abortions. When does a percentage become significant then? Is 0.3 percent indeed “a miniscule figure”?

There are 19 million unsafe abortions each year according to the World Health Organization statistics, which they sum up like this.

about 20 million of them (women with unplanned pregnancies) resort to unsafe abortion…

Rounding up a million? Okay, let’s keep reading.

Unsafe abortion – defined as a procedure for terminating an unwanted pregnancy either by persons lacking the necessary skills or in an environment lacking minimal medical standards or both – results in the deaths of 67 000 women every year…

Even if we conceded that 13 percent of all maternal mortalities are in fact from unsafe abortions, the percentage of women who die from them, according the the WHO’s own statistics, is 67,000/19,000,000 or 0.35 percent. Canada’s own maternal mortality rate is over double this, at 0.8 percent.

To put it plainly, less than half of a tenth of a percent of unsafe abortions result in maternal death.

For me, 19,000,000 is the most striking number in this mix, and it’s the number of abortions that I want to tackle, along with the other 87 percent of maternal deaths that seem to have been lost in the storm.

Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, is a strong voice taking a stand for open debate. Is it fate then, that has placed this Australian-born academic so firmly in Montreal?

It’s an oft-repeated truism in ethics: “Good facts are essential for good ethics.” So surely we need the facts about an issue as ethically fraught as abortion. Yet not only do we not have them, but they are intentionally not gathered or, if some are or might be available, access to them is denied.

Somerville goes on to explain how this favours the pro-choice side of the debate by perpetuating the myth of consensus. In detail, she illustrates just how difficult it is to obtain real facts about the number of late term abortions in Canada.

The facts on late-term abortions are intentionally made difficult to obtain. Some time ago, I contacted a staff member at Statistics Canada to ask about the numbers of late-term abortions. She told me they were instructed for political reasons not to collect statistics on the gestational age at which abortion occurs. She explained, however, that hospitals must report the number of abortions and about 45 per cent had continued to report gestational age. From these unsolicited reports, it’s known that at least 400 post-viability abortions take place in Canada each year and the actual number is most probably more than twice that. The Canadian Medical Association sets viability (some chance of the child living outside the womb) at 20 weeks gestation.

While this article does not directly advocate for fetal rights, it does present a well-written argument for the beginnings of such a debate. Academia is sometimes a difficult field in which to take this a stance, but Somerville is unrelenting in her criticisms, even to the point of using her colleagues as examples.

In discussion of abortion in classes in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, taught by faculty with relevant knowledge, no one challenges statements that there is a special clinic for post-22- weeks gestation abortion in downtown Montreal and that there is one designated hospital for abortion of 20- to 22-week gestation pregnancies. It’s also been reported in the media that the Quebec government sent a specialist obstetrician to the United States for training in late-term abortion. Although these facts are only circumstantial evidence, they hardly make it seem likely that late-term abortions are truly rare – at least in Quebec.

She closes,

…if the consensus they claim does exist, they have nothing to fear. And if it does not, then in a democracy a debate is exactly what is required.

…goes big box store.

Marie Stopes International (MSI) has opened five outlets in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu. Here the selective abortion of girls has led to a gender imbalance of up to 131 boys for every 100 girls.

The closeness of MSI’s relationship with the Chinese government was shown earlier this month when Li Bin, its population minister, visited the MSI offices in London and an abortion clinic in Bristol.

Plans are under way to set up three more MSI abortion clinics in China. Marie Stopes argues that its influence will help to change Chinese attitudes and promote the notion of women’s choice.

This is released just days after the first abortion ad from Marie Stopes aired in the UK. It seems that MSI is behaving exactly like any business would and expanding its efforts, in the name of “promoting women’s choice”… in China.

Marie Stopes carries out 65,000 abortions a year in Britain, most of them through NHS contracts for which it receives £30m a year. Surplus funds from the NHS work are channelled into the work of the international division.

Here is a link to their Chinese site. I don’t read mandarin, but the images are enough for me. I took special note of the smiling cartoon airplane flying overhead with its banner reading: “HAPPY!” That part, I could read.

Rightly or wrongly, Catholic clerics are rarely far from the firing line.

Two weeks ago, Cardinal Ouellet said that abortion in the case of rape was wrong. That triggered predictable stories that talked about the ensuing “firestorm of virulent reaction” against the Church, even though Cardinal Ouellet was simply repeating Catholic moral teaching and not proposing an amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Charles Lewis’ article here is an insight beyond the surface story to a look at what the Catholic Church is proposing in terms of proactive solutions to Canada’s abortion rates.

I am launching an appeal with my Ottawa colleague [Archbishop Prendergast] for an awareness campaign and [for] more programs providing assistance for women in distress in Canada,” Cardinal Ouellet said. “There is a great scarcity of information, support and financial assistance to enable pregnant women to make an informed choice.”

So what can we expect? More of these types of programs. The Gabriel Project outreach is in its earliest stages in Nova Scotia though it’s already running throughout the US, and we can expect to see more of these laypeople-run/church-supported programs pop up across this country in the near future. They’re an opportunity for the church to be proactive and to get laypeople, even non-Catholics, involved in the process.

Academic papers have throughout history been subject to selective use. A group or ideology will refer to only those quotations that support their arguments. So if you have the time to cut out the middle man on the recent paper ‘G8 Academies Joint Statement on Health of Women and Children’, you can read it in full for yourself here.