Great op ed by Shannon Joseph on maternal health initiative

This is excellent. Read the whole thing at the Ottawa Citizen. My bolds:

To the average Canadian, the obvious objective of maternal health programs would be to make motherhood and childbearing safer. Not so for many UN agencies, donor countries and powerful NGOs working at the United Nations. Their approach is to make motherhood safer by making it rarer. At the expense of the world's pregnant women, maternal health has become the latest vehicle for an old idea -- population control as a path to development.

Since the early 1970s, the United Nations has interwoven population control measures (including "voluntary" sterilization) into its development programs.

This has largely been done through a range of conditions placed on foreign aid. A donor country, like Sweden might say: "We will fund your primary health program as long as you ensure a specific level of uptake of contraceptive methods among local women and report on it. This is how we interpret primary health."

Desperately needing resources to strengthen primary health and other services, developing nations have had little choice but to acquiesce to these types of requirements.

If the debate on maternal health continues as it is, it too will come with population control strings attached. As with previous programs, patients will have to accept those strings (for example by helping to fill quotas for sterilization), or be denied the care they are actually seeking.

By any standard this is an abuse of power.