As you have a green beer, consider the prayer of St. Patrick. We forget that these lingering saint days have a Christian connection. So here’s your reminder, whether you believe or not:

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.

I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me;
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s hosts to save me
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a multitude.

Christ shield me today
Against wounding
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through the mighty strength
Of the Lord of creation.

I had written previously about the deaths of several women in Indian sterilization camps. This article explains to a greater extent the horrors that take place in these filthy centers, the lies that women are told and the tragic deaths and bodily harm that befalls them. Totally outrageous in all of this human misery is the fact that USAID underwrites most of these clinics!

Human rights activists have repeatedly documented that camps like those in Chhattisgarh are pervasive and routine throughout India. They’ve detailed how women are persuaded with cash incentives – or the chance to win a refrigerator or a car – and how they are coerced – into sterilizations. And they have described cases in harrowing detail: young childless women consenting to procedures by thumbprint unaware that it would leave them infertile; dozens of women being sterilized on school desks by doctors operating by flashlight; women maimed in the quest to meet government sterilization quotas.[5] Just last year, there was outrage after the national television station aired footage of women lined up and bleeding on the ground at a camp where 103 lower caste women had been sterilized in under five hours in another state.[6]

Yet none of the Supreme Court of India rulings, international policies and declarations, ever seem to make a difference in India which has been a playground for population controllers for decades.

Investigative journalist, Celeste McGovern, does a superb job in ousting the culprits of this human rights tragedy.  Despite distancing itself, USAID is found to have its tentacles all over the population control and government quotas for sterilizations in India.

Documents reveal that USAID has for more than two decades been at the helm of India’s family planning programs, not just funding the massive directive that includes tens of thousands of camps, but overseeing and orchestrating the entire program, even encouraging cash incentives for sterilization and IUD insertion.

McGovern goes on to describe how USAID designed a program called the Innovations in Family Planning Services (IFPS) launched in 1992 with $325 million from USAID to be matched by $400 million from India’s government. Buoyed up by the success of the IFPS, USAID and the IFPS created a special “autonomous parastatal” agency called the State Innovations in Family Planning Services Agency (SIFPSA) to “provide flexibility and avoid bureaucratic delays.” According to McGovern, they made an unaccountable agency to operate away from public view and outside the democratic process

This brilliantly researched article is a must read if you intend to know what is happening abroad with foreign aid money.

And stay tuned for Part 2.

photo credit: babasteve via photopin cc

This Reuters article reports on ten women who died this week in India through botched sterilizations.  Fourteen other women are in serious condition.

But deaths due to sterilization is not news in India.

Between 2009 and 2012, the government paid compensation for 568 deaths resulting from sterilization, the health ministry said in an answer to a question in parliament two years ago.

What grieves me most is that these women were undergoing sterilizations presumably because they already had children and couldn’t afford to have more.  That means that there are countless little children who have lost their mothers, in a country that is already hampered by disease and poverty.  What will the prospects be for their lives now?

Essentially these mothers have perished and their children’s lives have been substantially impoverished all because of ignorance; ignorance of the benefits and the life saving potential of Natural Family Planning.

We need to take a page out of the book of a little Saint, Mother Teresa.

Rather than trying to secure funds for condoms, hormonal contraception, clinics, and medical personnel to run the clinics, the Missionaries of Charity (the religious order founded by Mother Teresa) simply taught the people Natural Family Planning (NFP).

Most people roll their eyes at the mere suggestion of NFP, but wait, do they know about the successes of this simple, easy to learn method in some of the poorest nations of the world?  In 1993, the British Medical Journal published a study regarding the effectiveness of NFP in India.*

This blogger writes regarding this very study:

In India, where the poor learned NFP and relied on abstinence during the fertile phase, a study of 19,483 poor women had a pregnancy rate of less than 1%.

Further to that, she confirms what the Reuters article made obvious; that women are coerced into receiving these dangerous sterilizations through various means.  NFP however, seems not only to empower women to understand how their bodies work, but it also exempts them from government pressure.

The benefits they received went beyond the ability to plan their family size, however. Mercedes Wilson tells of how women in India would be dragged away and forcibly sterilized against their will. Women could be spared this violation, however, by carrying a card with them that stated they used NFP. In this instance, not only were the poor empowered with the knowledge of their own bodies, its use also protected them against government abuse.

*R.E.J. Ryder, “‘Natural Family Planning’: Effective Birth Control Supported by the Catholic Church,” British Medical Journal. 307 (18 September 1993).