Friday, June 11, 2010

Maternal Health — Pro-Abort Ideology Lacks Scientific Backing

After all the commotion on the Parliament Hill, after all those failed attempts to force the government to fund abortion as part of "women's health" initiative, it turns out that so called "family planning" doesn't really result in improved maternal health...
NEW YORK, June 9, 2010 (C-FAM) - Deep divisions with top United Nations (UN) officials and abortion activists on one side and maternal health researchers on the other became public this week during the Women Deliver 2 conference in Washington, DC. The dispute threatens to derail hopes of raising $30B for family planning at international development conferences in the coming months. These include the Group of Eight summit this month and the UN High Level Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Review in September.

The medical journal The Lancet published a study in April refuting UN research claiming that the 500,000+ annual maternal death statistic has remained unchanged for decades. The new study put the figure at 342,900 with 60,000 of those from HIV/AIDS, and said the number has been declining since 1980.

World Health Organization (WHO) executive director Margaret Chan told journalist Christiane Amanpour that legal abortion was a key factor in reducing maternal deaths, but the Lancet study she referred to never mentioned abortion.
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Scientists flatly refused to back up the 20 year-old claim by UN agencies and activists that family planning improves maternal health. The Guttmacher Institute's president, Sharon Camp, asked Murray whether his study's finding linking declining global fertility rates to better maternal health supports the idea that more family planning will reduce maternal deaths. Murray replied that "there is no scientific way to prove that."
If anything, abortion and contraception only make things worse. The link between abortion and breast cancer is known, but the pill too is not as harmless as the anti-family crowd wants us to believe:
Undeniable medical evidence confirms that use of the pill increases a woman's risk and incident for Breast, Cervical, and Liver Cancer. Prior to the pill and the widespread use of contraception there were known to be 5 sexually transmitted diseases. Today there are more than 30. Will treatment be free for these 50+ million US men and women who are reported to have incurable genital herpes (Source - Sexual Transmitted Disease Surveillance and Statistics, The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention)? And what about the health of unsuspecting young girls who now use hormonal contraceptives for a minimum of 4 years prior to their first full term pregnancy? Is it also a "health benefit" that according to the Guttmacher Institute they will have a 52% higher risk of developing breast cancer (Mayo Clinic Proceedings)? I think not.
So that's what a bunch of UN functionaries and their pro-abort friends want to spend $30B on. The pro-aborts are upset because Canada is not going to fund at least some of these initiatives. If anything - the government should have defunded every single organization that peddles abortion or contraception. So that maternal health initiatives would be really about maternal health.

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