If you read one article today, read this one by Paul Wells over at Maclean’s. It’s about the Maternal Health Summit that will take place in Toronto at the end of this month.
Life in Ottawa instills certain reflexes. I admit that when I learned about the Toronto summit—via a tweet from Laureen Harper—my reactions, in more or less this order, were: (1) scandal-plagued PM needs a distraction; (2) cheap PR stunt; (3) here’s another play to the PM’s social-conservative base.
I was not alone in these assumptions…
But I was left with a nagging question: Why would Ban Ki-moon and Melinda Gates lift a finger to help Harper’s campaigning strategy (motherhood and apple pie)? Harper has had strained relationships with the UN, where he was unable to land Canada a seat on the Security Council. I’ve got a crazy hunch Melinda Gates votes Democrat. Yet they’ll be in Toronto. So I started asking people who actually work in maternal and child health, and they told me a more complex story than any I’d brought to you before now.
Thanks to Paul Wells for digging into this issue.
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I’m awfully glad that the people involved are working from common ground on the issue of maternal health. Women don’t need access to elective abortion in order to stay healthy. You make far more progress when you work from areas that all sides agree upon (women should have access to skilled birth attendants, and children should have access to vaccines) and stay away from areas where there is huge amounts of dissension (the notion that abortion should be legal and easily available).
Sadly, I don’t really know if there is any common ground we can build on in Canada. I suspect if there were, we wouldn’t have gone 25 years without a law.