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Ah yes. The hate mail continues to pour in over today's treeware take on the Harper government's It-Makes-Me-Gag-Rule, its refusal to connect the dots between contraception and maternal healthcare.
For two months now, the Conservative mouthpiece on all this, International Cooperation Minister BevWhen asked about support for contraceptives and family planning in an interview last week, Ms. Oda said: "In order to maintain our focus, again our focus is on maternal and child health and mortality rates.
"We want to make sure that mothers, pregnant women, are healthy and can have safe births, and that the birthing process is made safer because if you look at the number of births during the actual birthing process, that's where a number of maternal deaths happen," she added.
"We also want to make sure when babies are born, they are born as healthy as possible so that they can live through their early age, up to the age of five, with as strong and good health as possible."
Plenty of background here. And here.
Oda's unwavering inability to concede on contraception has been repeated by Status of Women Minister Helena Guergis and just the other day by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.
It's been a political firestorm, which got diverted by the abortion debate -- which took the focus off contraception, a necessary component of any maternal healthcare program.
The government's ridiculous and backward stance started getting international attention this week. Examples are here, here, here and here.
Extraordinary events in Canada over the last couple of days with the potential to embarrass mightily the G8, meeting in Ontario in late June. The host government's "legacy initiative" is on maternal and child health. The entire GB is expected to sign up to a package intended to save the lives of women and their dependent young children. But - and prepare to rub your eyes now - Stephen Harper and his ministers appear to want to exclude family planning from it. And it's not even just unsafe abortion (which kills thousands every year) that appears to be in their minds.
Then, on Thursday, wha ... ? Spinarama? Cover your buttism?
Said the PM in Question Period:
“We are not closing doors against any options including contraception. But we do not want a debate here or elsewhere on abortion.”
So why did you allow your ministers to say what they did for as long and as often as they did?
Here is today's column, in toto, with some added linkage.
D id Prime Minister Stephen Harper put a condom instead of a thinking cap on his head when, two months ago, he announced his now internationally ridiculed policy on "maternal and child health" that he's going to promote at the coming G8 summit?How else to explain his intransigence on women's access to family planning – as if a mother's ability to have no more babies than she can feed, clothe and protect has nothing to do with either's health?
Has he never heard the expression AIDS orphan? Obstetric fistula? High-risk pregnancy?
And we're not even talking about abortion here. This is about the pill, IUDs, diaphragms – and education.
Sure, Harper appeared to flip-flop Thursday by saying he's not "closing doors" -- but so far they've been slammed shut.
For all the statistics Harper has spouted on the 2 million women and children who die every year due to lack of proper care during pregnancy and delivery, has he not looked at a medical book instead of the Good Book?
Because, make no mistake, his dismissal of good maternal health practice is purely ideological, not gynecological.
Consider the support this contraception-free initiative has received from religious groups that are anti-reproductive rights.
For example, both the hardline LifeSiteNews and R.E.A.L. Women of Canada, which back every anti-choice move any Conservative MP makes, no matter how unscientific or misogynistic, are cheering on this "maternal health" policy.
Never mind that doctors and medical groups, not to mention health workers in the field, contradict the HarperCon position.
On Thursday, the Ottawa-based Federation of Medical Women of Canada, was the latest to denounce the government on this issue. "By excluding family planning, there will be even more pressures on already vulnerable health systems, devastating consequences on any attempts to implement maternal health programs, and tragic loss of millions of lives that could otherwise have been saved," its member physicians said in a statement.
They were reacting to what Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Tuesday during a meeting of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, in response to questions on the direct correlation between access to contraception and women's deaths.
"This (policy) does not deal in any way, shape, or form with family planning," said Cannon. "Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to save lives."
What's worse is that, as Cannon would later suggest to reporters, he personally is pro-choice.
Then there are International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda and Status Of Women Minister Helena Guergis – neither of who has ever practised birth control, right? – who also parrot the party line.
Said Guergis in the status of women committee Monday, in reply to a question on what she will do for maternal and child health care, both here and abroad: "I will play whatever role it is that the Prime Minister is defining for me in this process, happily, and I'm very proud and honoured to be a part of that process."
Talk about A Handmaid's Tale.
As for Oda, on Wednesday she told the House that the government will be "providing clean water, vaccinations, better nutrition, as well as the most effective way (in) the training of health care workers and improving access for those women, that is what we are going to do."
Sure all that is important, but as one friend cracked on Facebook, "Dead women can't drink clean water."
Besides, research shows that when it comes to health care in impoverished nations, women – as they often are in everything else – are second-class citizens, always at the back of the line.
So, while improving the medical infrastructure will definitely help these societies as a whole, it may not do that much more for mothers and newborns.
Nice try, PM Harper.
But it's obvious: This is just a Trojan horse for your religious beliefs.
Couple things.
One, today Maclean's Paul Wells exhaustively unpacked Stephen Harper's right-ho politics. It is a must-read.
Two, it's been suggested to me by Facebook friend Alexandra Mandelis that the only family planning the HarperCons might support are condoms and the good ole rhythm method.
Now taking bets on how long before the HarperCons issue a statement saying that because they are not interesting in reopening the abortion debate, the only family planning devices their "signature" initaitive will include are all those that can't cause "very early abortions" - also called "abortifacients" by the anti-choice. "Abortifacient" methods include the Pill, emergency contraception, the patch and the IUD - all hormonal methods.
Alexandra is probably correct in her prediction
Consider the Pill, which prevents ovulation. True, every once in a huge while, mostly because a woman forgets to take her daily dose, an egg can slip by and get fertilized. The Pill would prevent that zygote from implantation, BTW.) But the risk of that is insignificant. Still, that doesn't stop the Pill Kills posse from shrieking that the Pill evil and kills babies.
Funny how they are more concerned about theoretical single-celled embryos than starving orphans who lost their mothers because their exhausted and undernourished bodies couldn't pump out that 10th baby.
Stumbled across this stunning -- in so many ways -- National Film Board documentary the other day.
It is totally worth 94 minutes of your time to get to know New Zealand political economist Marilyn Waring. Her ideas, boiled down to their most basic, relate to how what women do and contribute count for nothing in a world measured by leading, lagging and other economic indicators.
For example, activities which involve monetary transactions count as production even when
they involve the degradation of the earth's resources, such as strip-mining. A sunset has no value, nor a mountain, and trees only count when they have been chopped down and sold. At the same time, Waring criticizes traditional economics for not finding a way to value community well-being. By current thinking, war and disaster are 'good for the economy' because they create jobs such as arms production and clean-up.
As Gloria Steinem wrote in the introduction to Waring's book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, she will change your worldview. She certainly helped me crystallize many inchoate ideas I have had about women's work and place in the world.
Sometimes this film, which requires zero expertise in economics, just blew me away. It even helped me formulate today's treeware column about childcare.
But Waring's about so much more than that. My young economist friend Aaron Braaten tweeted back at me the other day that Waring, one of his idols, was years ahead of her time when this film was made in 1995.
Unfortunately, she still is years ahead of her time.
But at least, now, there's a realization that, while it's still a man's world, women make it go round.
If you have an iPhone, get the free NFB app and watch it on your commute or in bed or wherever you are. Or sit at the computer.
Just don't miss it.
This first-person account by Bridget Potter, who found herself pregnant at 19 in the pre-Pill days of 1962, speaks for itself.
Here are some excerpts. But please read the whole chilling thing.
Sociologist Rickie Solinger in her book Wake Up Little Susie, describes what it was like to have an unwanted pregnancy in 1962. The woman might be “futilely appealing to a hospital
abortion committee; being diagnosed as neurotic, even psychotic by a mental health professional; expelled from school (by law until 1972); unemployed; in a Salvation Army or some other maternity home; poor, alone, ashamed, threatened by the law.” There was also an acute social stigma attached to an unwed mother with an illegitimate child; maternity homes were frequently frightening and far away. All counseled adoption. The only alternatives were a shotgun wedding or an illegal abortion.
According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies. Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the Guttmacher Institute, a respected international organization dedicated to sexual and reproductive health, estimates that during the pre-Roe vs. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In 1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher, since the majority went unreported.
<SNIP>
Emily Perl knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been taken care of by a woman in an apartment on West 86th Street. When Michael and I arrived, she put the chain on the inside of the door and peeped through the crack. She let me in but demanded that Michael wait in the lobby. The room was dark, overheated, and smelled of boiled cabbage. I glimpsed a big Victorian wood-framed, red velvet couch and a round, oak pedestal table through the dinge. In her fifties, the woman had an Eastern European accent, suspiciously black hair, and smeary scarlet lipstick. She was curt.
She would “pack” my uterus and send me home where I must rest. For a day or two. When I started to bleed I must return and she would take care of it. What would she put inside me, I asked clumsily. “Stoff,” she replied. Where would she “take care” of it, I asked. She pointed to a door. “In ze udder room.” I must “svear” not go to a doctor or a hospital. I understood the chilling threat. “It’s nowting,” she said. “If you wanna now is fine. Five hunnerd dollars. Cash.”
My rent was sixty dollars a month. I earned sixty dollars a week, forty-seven dollars after taxes. I could barely make it Friday to Friday. I thanked her and fled. There had to be a cheaper, safer way.<SNIP>
Written in pencil was a name and an address. My dress was wet, my tarmacked shoes stuck to the ground as I walked. I had proud long hair then that I ironed straight. It frizzed in the humidity. I handed a cab driver the paper. He spoke no English but I could tell that he thought I was mistaken, that I didn’t want to go there. That it was far. Yes, yes. I nodded emphatically at the paper, taking it back from him and pointing with my finger at the address. Finally I understood his words: twenty dollars. I handed him money and off we went, out of San Juan, on dirt roads for what seemed like hours, to a small village built around a grassy square. The square was still, empty save for a few mangy looking dogs, a couple of chickens, and two old men sitting on a bench playing a board game. He dropped me in front of an open building, which appeared to be someone’s house.
A small man glanced at me from inside, and pointed to the whitewashed stairs that rose along the wall. At the top stood a second man, dressed in white pants and an undershirt. His massive shoulders and arms were those of a wrestler. He must be a bodyguard, I thought. But he immediately started talking about the money in fluent, barely accented English. He could take care of me but traveler’s checks were no good to him. I didn’t have enough money for the cab fair to the hotel and back again on top of the two hundred and fifty dollars that he was demanding. Are you alone, he asked? Yes, I said. We agreed on two hundred dollars. He would wait. I returned in the twilight with the cash.
A wooden table, no anesthesia, a scraping sound, and a newspaper-lined metal bucket. I moaned. Be quiet, he demanded. Or did I want him to stop? No, no. Go on. Please. Go on.
<SNIP>
In the New York Times in June 2008, Waldo Fielding, a retired gynecologist, described his experience with incomplete abortion complications.
“The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous ‘coat hanger’—which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in—perhaps the patient herself—found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it… Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion—darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.”
Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S. It is speculated that the actual number was likely much higher.Today, about sixty-seven thousand women worldwide still die each year from abortions, mostly in countries where the procedure is illegal.
Did I happen to mention that PM Stephen Harper doesn't think that contraception, never mind abortion, has anything to do with maternal health?
Now, let me see, if I were 22 years old, with seven or eight kids to feed and clothe, with miles to walk every morning to just get water with which to wash clothes and cook some rice, the last thing my exhausted body and fragile family would need is another pregnancy -- or a dose of HIV.
But does the Harper government get that?
Is the Pope Catholic? (Oh and he's another one who cares about women and, cough cough, children.)
I've hit on this topic before, here, here, here, etc., about PM Stephen Harper's announcement two months ago on supporting maternal health at the coming G8 summit, and how he and his handmaiden international cooperation minister Bev Oda refuse to connect maternal health to family planning, access to contraception and condoms -- which means freedom from dying in childbirth, freedom from AIDS, which means, uh, maternal health. (Read this, if you have a sec.)
But they don't make those connections in TheoConWorld.
Anyway.
Here's the latest, from the Star's Susan Delacourt:
In the Commons on Wednesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda pointedly left birth control off the list of aid projects the government intended to support, saying that “saving lives” was more important than family planning.
“We have chosen to focus the world’s lenses on saving the lives of mothers and children,” Oda said. “When we know what we can do by providing clean water, vaccinations, better nutrition, as well as the most effective way is the training of health care workers and improving access for those women, that is what we are going to do.”
And on Tuesday, during a Commons committee hearing, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon made clear that the maternal-health priority “does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning.”
Liberals and New Democrats are incredulous, saying that this is a direct copy of the foreign aid policies of former U.S. president George W. Bush, who banned any support for aid organizations that supported abortion in developing countries for the eight years he was in office. Barack Obama reversed that ban within days of taking power last year.
That would be the so-called Global Gag Rule.
To continue:
Liberal MP Keith Martin, also a doctor, said without providing access to a “full array” of family planning options, women and men can’t protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies.
“As a result, you have higher abortion rates, more disease, more maternal deaths and more maternal injuries,” Martin said.
He said he was “shocked” that the government took family planning off the table and accused the Conservatives of being hypocritical.
“They can’t say on the one hand they want to save lives . . . yet on the other, deprive people of having the tools to be able to reduce the death rate,” he said.
“The government is slaughtering good medical practice on the altar of ideology,” he said, adding that the government’s medical plan “defies science.
“In fact, it violates the ethics of good medical practice,” said Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca).
But, with this government, it's not about good medical practice. It's about making women be fruitful and multiply, even if multiplying kills them and their children.
Status of women mannequin minister Helena Guergis is not standing up for real maternal health either, judging from this message track exchange with NDP MP Irene Mathyssen at Monday's committee meeting.
Ms. Irene Mathyssen: What role will you play in the Prime Minister's G8 maternal and child health initiative, if any, and are you at all concerned by the fact that money for women and children in this country has not appreciably increased in regard to maternal health and child health?
Hon. Helena Guergis: I will play whatever role it is that the Prime Minister is defining for me in this process, happily, and I'm very proud and honoured to be a part of that process.
Memo to the HarperCons: Read a book, maybe a science book, or a medical text.
Just not the ''Good Book.''
(Image from Save the Mothers.)
UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Susan has some late night thoughts.
There's been plenty of emailing, tweeting, Facebook posting, blogging and more about International Women's Day, now marking its 100th anniversary. No question women in the west have considerably advanced from being nothing more than chattel to citizens ostensibly enjoying equal rights. (Although, the fight really never ends.)
But the human race and the planet would be far better off if women everywhere had access to reproductive choices and maternal healthcare, education and land and property rights. Instead, they suffer forced marriage, devastatingly early pregnancies, multiple births, crushing burdens of having to look after small children while also walking miles for food, water and kindling ...
Over the past couple of years, since this blog was birthed, I've been pleased to see some of these notions gain traction beyond the usual NGOs. There's a lot of talk. But there seems to be little political action.
Political action is what is needed.
And so, for International Women's Day, I would like to propose you do one thing to help women in one country where we already investing so much blood and treasure.
Afghanistan. Land of that despicable puppet we support Hamid Karzai.
Orzala Ashraf, a women’s rights activist in Kabul, blames the government: “Laws are clear about crimes but we see big criminals thriving and being nurtured by the state for illicit political gains,” she told IRIN, pointing to the government’s alleged failure to address human rights violations committed over the past three decades of conflict.
“Because no one is put on trial for his crimes, a criminal culture is being promoted: violators have no fear of the law, prosecution and a meaningful penalty,” said Ashraf.
Deep-seated ambivalence to women’s rights is evident from a law signed off by President Hamid Karzai in early 2009: The Shia Personal Status Law, dubbed a ‘rape legalizing law’, was amended after strong domestic and international pressure.
“The first version [of the law] was totally intolerable,” said Najia Zewari, a women’s rights expert with the UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Despite positive changes in the final version, there are articles that still need to be discussed and reviewed further,” she said.
Another example of this ambivalence is the case of the men who threw acid in the faces of 15 female students in Kandahar city in November 2008: Karzai publicly vowed they would be “severely punished” but court officials in Kandahar and Kabul have said they are unaware of the case and do not know where the alleged perpetrators are.
“Judges say the men were wrongly accused and forced to confess,” Ranna Tarina, head of Kandahar women’s affairs department, told IRIN.
More on that rape law here and here.
Today RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan put out this statement:
Today, on the 8th of March, Afghan women are mourning for the gang-rape of Bashiras and
Saimas, for being flogged by most lowed elements, for being auctioned in open market and for their young daughters who put an end to their miserable lives by self-immolation. But the perpetrators of all these crimes are forgiven; therefore they enjoy complete immunity, are still holding their official positions and tightening it through plundering our people and country.
Though we don’t expect anything different from the most corrupt and dirty puppet regime of the world, the pain of Afghan women turns chronic when the world believes that the US and NATO has donated liberation, democracy and human and women rights for Afghanistan; whereas, after eight years of the US and allies’ aggression under the banner of “war on terror”, they empowered the most brutal terrorists of the Northern Alliance and the former Russian puppets – the Khalqis and Parchamis – and by relying on them, the US imposed a puppet government on Afghan people. And instead of uprooting its Taliban and Al-Qaeda creations, the US and NATO continues to kill our innocent and poor civilians, mostly women and children, in their vicious air raids.
<SNIP>
RAWA is eager to get united in solidarity with individuals and forces that are ready to fight for democracy in an independent front against the occupation, the Taliban, Jehadi and Khalqi and Parchami homeland-sellers.
While women of Afghanistan are experiencing a new era of captivity and are in the grip of the fundamentalist monsters, RAWA sends it heartfelt salutations to struggling brave women of Iran, Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Nepal, India and the rest of the world and announces solidarity with them.
So, this is the kind of thing our tax dollars are supporting.
Do I advocate abandoning these people? No. But I do think that we can let our politicians know that this is not acceptable, not under Canada's flag.
No deals with corrupt women-haters. Simple. Let your MP know. Let the PM know too.
Antonia Zerbisias has been a Star columnist since 1989 but has been telling people what she thinks ever since she could open her mouth. Her career ambition as an opinionator dates back to Grade 9 when a cartoon commentary on a teacher resulted in her suspension from high school. The principal sent her home with a note calling her "rude, obstreperous and bold." Her parents were neither amused, nor surprised. Once she was punished for being that way. Now she makes it pay. And, because she can take it as well as dish it out, she wants to hear what you have to say. Fire away!
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