Canada--please don't fund overseas abortions!

Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced a laudable goal--to lead the way in reducing maternal and infant mortality around the world. I attended a post- roundtable newser that International Development Minister Bev Oda hosted yesterday. Here's Brian Lilley's report. An excerpt:

It’s hard to argue with the idea of saving the lives of women giving birth or of ensuring that children do make it to their 5th birthday, yet when most people think of what kind of action would best accomplish such goals, they likely think of what the Prime Minister outlined in his article; clean water, nutrition, vaccinations, and better training of local health care workers. That’s not what everyone has in mind.

A group in Britain called the Optimum Population Trust advocates aggressive family planning and reducing the world’s population in order to save the environment and reduce global CO2 emissions. Such a group would normally not be of interest in Canada but the OPT has the ear of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, meaning that the G8 meeting is likely to hear about how we can save women from dying in child birth by preventing child birth.

Knowing this, I asked Minister Oda whether the Harper government was leaning toward the aggressive family planning model or favoured the building of local health clinics. While Minister Oda said she was seeking the best advice and not leaning in any direction at this point, one of the experts around the table nodded her head in agreement as I asked my question. Jennifer Kitts from Action Canada for Population and Development approached me excitedly after the news conference to tell me that family planning is key to reducing maternal mortality and infant deaths.

Kitts says that 30% of maternal deaths can be avoided and infant mortality can be reduced by 20% with proper family planning. Now I quickly understood how family planning could reduce maternal death but when I asked her to explain how family planning could help children live past their 5th birthday, Ms. Kitts became nervous and asked me to turn off my recorder. I asked her the question again and she told me she would have to do the interview later. The coin eventually dropped, the people at ACPD plan to reduce infant mortality by reducing the number of infants born. A major part of family planning for ACPD is abortion.

Now it really doesn’t matter which side of the abortion issue you fall on, when you hear that a government wants to reduce infant mortality, funding abortions in developing countries is likely not what comes to mind. When the Prime Minister says it is troubling that 9 million children die before their 5th birthday, most Canadians don’t think aborting children in developing countries so that they never have a birthday is the solution.

The government material stresses all the right material. It's the advice behind closed doors that is troubling.