In what way are they ‘delivering women’?

There was this bogus conference last week – a huge, international gathering of people with big titles and lots of influence – on the subject of maternal health across the globe.

It was called Women Deliver — a snappy little title with more than a hint of the girls-can-do-anything approach to the world’s problems. It is ambiguous, however, because the problem in this case concerns women for whom “delivering” is fraught with danger: those mothers in developing countries who lack basic care in pregnancy and childbirth.

This had such potential, because the topic is critical to address and world resources could be directed toward great aid and relief efforts to truly protect women and their children and help them thrive.

With hundreds of politicians present it could have been a terrific conference, except that it wasn’t. At least, not for the women who are facing death or ill health in bringing children into the world. It turned out that the answer to their urgent needs is not so much basic health care as abortion: ‘You don’t want to die having a baby? Well, start by having fewer.’

It’s always about abortion. Want to reduce poverty and world hunger? Reduce the number of poor and hungry people, give poor women more access to abortion. Of course, they went through the motions of talking about maternal health issues.

Yes, there were discussions about gaps in professional care, lack of vaccines, genital mutilation, fistula and many other things that make birth risky, but much, much more talk about ensuring that fewer births actually happen. Safe motherhood meant, above all, safe abortion, which in turn meant legal abortion. 

How did such a major international conference get so one-sided, and so driven by the anti-life agenda of abortion and contraception?

Women Deliver was always going to be a convocation of the usual suspects on the reproductive rights scene. These have long since included, to the frustration of those committed to international co-operation for development, United Nations agencies: the Population Fund, the WHO, the World Bank and even UNICEF, the children’s fund. The leading light of the conference was Jill Sheffield of Family Care International, standard-bearer of the Safe Motherhood (and safe abortion) movement. International Planned Parenthood was on the organising committee and Marie Stopes International played a key role (Marie Stopes held its own abortion conference straight after.) Both organisations have a financial stake in abortion. Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice — a patently inauthentic organisation — starred in a plenary session.

The pity of it is that they have garnered umpteen millions of dollars that will go, first and foremost, into promoting and supplying birth control. Women in Africa and Asia will continue to wait for basics like clean water, sanitation, vaccination against malaria, nutritional supplements, good birth attendants and hospitals, while the supply of contraceptives and abortions is fast-tracked.

We shake our heads, then go about our business. This is like getting hit in dodge ball when you’re not paying attention. Carolyn Moynihan over at MercatorNet really delivered a startling alert here.

Today’s reproductive rights movement is merely nineteenth century eugenics (“More from the fit, less from the unfit”) in its respectable old age. And if eugenics is not dead, neither is colonialism, only today it is called globalisation. The reproductive conquest of the “dark races” is not yet complete. It is well under way, even in Africa, but there are some stubbornly fertile regions.

What the birth control brigade seems too stupid to see is that making motherhood — not abortion — really safe would reduce fertility anyway, at least to the level that couples in developing countries actually want. This is no doubt higher than western couples, brainwashed by decades of birth control propaganda, now aspire to — and what really bugs Marie Stopes and Co.

But what self-respecting African woman wants to live like her English or American sister: still looking for a husband at 35; at risk of breast cancer from years on the pill; her fertility damaged by sexually transmitted disease and abortion; the prospect of having a child at all ever more remote. How unintelligent is that?

It’s staggering. And just think, those who least get it are the very ones leading these big international conferences.

Fortunately, those who do get it are doing something about it on an international scale, too.