G8 Summit 2010 (Only for Us, Not for Them)

[aduidarnenye]

The G8 Summit is starting soon. Already there was a meeting of international development ministers in Halifax, to discuss maternal health, child welfare, and family planning. Naturally, this has turned into a huge abortion debate.

Canada has decided to not fund abortions for developing countries. In Canada it's quite legal to get an abortion and quite easy. But apparently the PM, who said that he won't be re-opening the abortion debate for Canada, has decided to open it up for Africa and deny women abortions there.

The rest of the summit begins this summer, but I thought that the maternal health care summit was an interesting lead in to the summit.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/...777/story.html

When the Harper government announced that as president of the G8 this year, it would spearhead a global effort to save the lives of mothers and children, it did not specify that no aid would go to women who wanted to terminate a pregnancy, even if they had been raped or sexually mutilated or on the edge of starvation.

Abortion is not illegal in Canada. It is widely accessible, safe, and publicly subsidized, an option open to women who want to use it. For the government of a country where even talking about restricting abortion access would be political suicide to announce it will not fund abortion in parts of the world where botched abortions kill thousands of women is taking hypocrisy to a new and shocking level.

In Canada, the maternal mortality rate is one of the lowest in the world: Six women die per 100,000 live births. In Kenya, in contrast, 413 women die per 100,000 births, according to a recent study.

Kenyan women battle hunger, disease, poverty, a lack of medical care, and unequal access to education. Many are subject to physical and sexual violence.

In the absence of accessible abortion, women put wires or sticks into their uteruses, overdose on malaria drugs, or inject themselves with poison. In 2008, Ms. magazine reported, an estimated 300,000 abortions were carried out in that one African country.

In its report, Ms. magazine described three women who were hospitalized after illegal abortions: a 15-year-old girl who had been gang-raped by five men; a law student left with a perforated uterus; a mother of four whose husband earned $1 a day.

Around the world, 13 per cent of pregnancy-related deaths result from abortion-related complications, according to the World Health Organization. That means an estimated 70,000 women die every year following unsafe abortions. In Kenya, a horrifying 40 per cent of pregnancy-related in Kenya result from abortion-related complications.

But for the Conservative government, these women are somebody else's problem. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, speaking in Halifax Monday, said other G8 countries are free to pay for abortions in developing nations. Canadians, he elaborated Tuesday, "want to see their foreign-aid money used for things that will help save the lives of women and children in ways that unite the Canadian people rather than divide them."

Canadians might be divided on abortion, but it is unlikely they believe women should die because they chose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It's even less likely that they want to see these women's children suffer - in the developing world, it is mainly women who are already mothers who seek abortions.

If the Harper government genuinely wants to help save the lives of women and children, there is no way around what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly described as the full gamut of health services.

In Canada in March, she tackled the Conservatives head on, saying: "You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health and reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortions."

While controversy swirls around the Harper government's plans to promote the health of women and children in faraway places, less attention has been paid to how much money it is willing to put up in the effort.

Canada's foreign aid, already embarrassingly low by international standards, fell another 9.5 per cent in 2008, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In a year in which Canada is host to the G8 and G20 summits and in which it promised to lead the way on maternal and child health spending, it has brought in a measure that will see foreign aid drop starting next year. Did the government think no one would notice? Or care?

Generous, targeted aid works. By simultaneously investing in both family planning and maternal and newborn services, the deaths of nearly 400,000 women and 1.6 million children would be prevented, unintended pregnancies would drop by more than two-thirds and abortions by 75 per cent, according to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute and the United Nations Population Fund.

Already, aid has helped. Worldwide, maternal deaths have dropped from more than 500,000 in 1980 to fewer than 350,000 in 2008, the British medical journal the Lancet reported this month.

These are real, flesh-and-blood people we're talking about. It is a disgrace that Canada's government seems determined to treat them like cheap political fodder.

[Zilong]

As much as I wanna say lolcanada, there is a thread in the first page showing just how even more bass ackward the US is...

lolkenya then I guess, that's what they get for sending a sleeper agent for taking over the US

[Takedown3]

we got our ABO here, went to morgan teller in toronto, place was sealed up tighter then fort knox, no signs, heavy iron doors, security and multiple layers of checks until finally reaching the waiting room.

was quite nice, felt safe, and didn't take more then a couple of hours if i remember correctly.

wifey does tell me that they gave her MANY chances to change her mind, 3 or 4 times they made statements along the lines "now you are SURE you want to go thru with this" etc. But she never felt pressure to turn around and walk out.

also nice that it was FREE, minus the higher taxes due to socialized medicine.

however when we speak about doing similar things in other countries a whole gambit of issues comes up. in canada it's a right, but in other countries it's not so cut and dry. the article unfairly makes canada look like the bad guy here when it seems to me they just dont want to push our decisions on others. at least when it comes to abortion.