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.

The maternal health debate continues and will do so until the G8/G20 meetings. But should abortion be included in maternal health in the developing world?

Be it resolved that a compassionate and effective aid agenda is one where safe and legal abortions are publicly funded

Click here to watch me debate this resolution. May the best woman win!

“Harmonize.” A new word for lying?

NEW YORK – C-FAM)  At a meeting on maternal and child health research in Washington last week, United Nations (UN) staff and abortion advocates told scientists they should “harmonize” their findings or discuss them “in a locked room” so that the press could not report maternal death numbers that conflicted with the ones they use to lobby policy makers and major international donors.  Ann Starrs, co-founder and president of the abortion advocacy organization Family Care International (FCI), told a roomful of scientists to “lock all the academics in a black box and have them come out with a consensus set of numbers” or “at least hide that there is disagreement” and “infighting.” FCI is the founder of Women Deliver, which is hosting a massive UN-backed reproductive rights fundraising conference in Washington next week.

When I meet people, as I have four times now, whose story includes a biological mom who sought out abortion but couldn’t get one, I look at them and think–wow–you were really destined to be here, to do great things. In each of the four cases, these people are doing great things in their spheres of influence, having overcome more difficult than average obstacles.

One more such story, here.

I’d like to meet the mothers and see how they are doing in life. But given privacy laws and the decision of the people I know not to seek out their biological moms, this is more difficult.

(h/t)

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.

… gives us Andrea Bocelli (aka the “blind tenor”). It matters what we choose. As he says, maybe he’s partisan, but there is no question for him that his mother made the right choice.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QfKCGTfn3o]

Stephanie Gray could get elected as an MP, since Ms. Hedy Fry is only willing to debate abortion in the House of Commons.

…leads to hiding babies and distributing them amongst relatives so as to avoid the authorities. A Chinese demographer therefore suggests the official statistics are wrong:

Liang has discovered discrepancies in China’s census. “In 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million 10 year-old children, an increase of three million,” he said. His findings suggest that the one-child policy may not have the grim consequences that have been widely predicted.

While I’d be glad to hear that’s true, it doesn’t change the grim nature of the one-child policy. Neither does it change past reports of seeing classrooms filled with boys, for example.