“She Shouldn’t Have to Choose Between Barrenness and Death”
10/6/11
Simcha Fisher at the National Catholic Register has some insightful comments on a new study finding that injectable contraceptives are linked to a higher risk of HIV infection.
She quotes a World Health Organization epidemiologist who calls the situation a “dilemma,” explaining, “We want to make sure that we warn when there is a real need to warn, but at the same time we don’t want to come up with a hasty judgement that would have far reaching severe consequences for the sexual and reproductive health of women.”
Fisher asks:
Why is it is important to put all of Africa on birth control? Well,
“Hundreds of thousands of [African women] suffer injuries, bleeding, infections and even death in childbirth from unintended pregnancies.”
Let’s step back for a moment and talk about unintended pregnancies. According to Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute, about half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. You can add me in there, Guttmacher: some of my favorite babies came as a complete surprise to me and my husband. So I challenge, with all my might, the assumption that “unintended” is the same as “shouldn’t have happened.” And no, it’s not different for me because I’m white and went to college. Africans love and need their babies, too, and can grasp the concept of caring for a child whose conception was unplanned.
Now let’s return to the statistics about what happens when women actually give birth. How many American women suffer injuries, bleeding, infections and death in childbirth? These numbers are harder to come by, but this comparative chart gives you the general idea: the maternal death rate in the US is about 8 per 100,000 women. In African nations, the rate is as high as 1,100 per 100,000.
The global community spends billions of dollars per year flooding Africa with contraception. WHO pushes and pushes to change centuries-old African love for large families.
She goes on to offer an alternative to simply pushing other forms of contraceptives:
How about offering more aid for safe childbirth? Maternal and neonatal death is often easily preventable with basic care. The postpartum African woman who is septic or hemorrhaging to death does not need a shiny new type of contraceptive. She needs help. She needs basic medical supplies.
She shouldn’t have to choose between barrenness and death.
Read the whole thing here. Fisher’s comments reflect the experiences of organizations such as the Population Research Institute, who found when asking people in Ghana what kind of aid they really needed, “reproductive health care” was last on the list. But as one PRI investigator discovered, the needs and desires of people in the developing world are not that important:
PRI investigator Joseph Meaney, visiting a UN refugee camp in Albania in 1999, was struck by the fact that many of the Kosovo refugee women he was speaking to were eager to have more children, in part to make up for those they had lost to Serbian atrocities. When he mentioned this to a UNFPA doctor, the man exploded with disdain for his charges: “They’re refugees, don’t you see! They can’t have children!”
Who are we to tell the poor women of the world that they cannot have more children? This is not reproductive health. This is reproductive oppression, and the women from these developing nations recognize it for what it is: an assault on their fertility and ultimately, their race. …
Get the whole story of what PRI found, and why the perception that people in developing countries support “reproductive health programs” is wrong, in this article from The Post-Abortion Review archives (downloadable pdf).
Update (10/6/11): A maternal health group that saves the lives of pregnant women in developing countries has been denied funding in Canada for its refusal to provide contraception and abortion:
Walley also said that MaterCare being refused money based on its Catholic stance against abortion and contraception is a complete non-issue and should have no influence in the agency’s decision.
“Abortion and birth control are irrelevant to solving the problem of maternal mortality,” he underscored.
“All the deaths occur during the last three months of pregnancy, during labor and delivery, and one week after—so what on earth is a birth control pill or a condom going to do?”
Learn more here.
Update (7/18/12): Dr. Timothy Flanigan, an HIV researcher and professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Brown University Medical School who has cared for patients with HIV and AIDS for more than 25 years, discusses new research “that raises serious concerns about whether hormonal contraception — Depo-Provera and oral contraception pills (OCT) — actually doubles the risk of a woman acquiring HIV if she is exposed.”
More related articles:
African Babies Aren’t the Threat:
This disconnect is reflected in the aid that many in the West think they owe to Africa. The most recent and most concerning example of this disconnect is the recently launched No Controversy campaign led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government. Mrs. Gates and her partners, which include the world’s largest abortion providers, have launched an enormous campaign to provide contraceptives for women in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Mrs. Gates’ efforts are a concern because apparently the only thing she and her partners intend to cure with this campaign is pregnancy, which is not a disease. One can’t help but wonder what the $4.6 billion they already have raised could do to bring effective medical care closer to those who need it rather than simply preventing our children from being born.
Uganda Shows Contraceptives Not the Answer to HIV/AIDS:
The population controllers have demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that they do not care if the HIV/AIDS rate is reduced in Uganda; they only care that their worldview is imposed on the people, and if the result is the deaths of hundreds of thousands, so be it. Their activities have already directly caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Ugandans. Not only are they pushing contraceptives that actually promote the HIV epidemic, they are committing human rights abuses on a huge scale with virtual impunity, and are ignoring the laws of this sovereign nation.
The Weakest Women Pay: Higher Risk of HIV Infection With Hormonal Contraceptives:
Isobel Coleman, Director of Women and Foreign Policy Program of the Council on Foreign Relations is very clear: the international community is faced with a first-order crisis in the challenge of health of the population of the third world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and other institutions of the United Nations, however, do not seem to be of the same opinion. “We want to make sure that we warn when there is a real need to warn,” said Mary Lyn Gaffield, a WHO epidemiologist, in the New York Times. Many commentators have called the WHO’s silence scandalous: there has been no official communication nor any action taken to inform the millions of African women who are unaware of the risk they are taking. The promise to study the question in depth at a conference to be held in January, demonstrates that when it comes to women’s health, the WHO and pharmaceutical companies – including Pfizer who refused to comment – continue to use different weights and different measures for the third world.
