Brian Lilley does amazing work covering the Canadian political scene for Examiner.com. His latest post is about the promise by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to reduce maternal and infant mortality abroad. Unfortunately, in doing so, Harper has aligned his government with abortion advocates and population control zealots:
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.
That last part is a the point: Canadians think reducing maternal and infant mortality is a good thing but few people would link those goals with abortion. If Ottawa wants to reduce maternal mortality in the developing world, link up with groups such as MaterCare International . MaterCare was founded and is run by Dr. Robert Walley out of St. John’s, Newfoundland. We wrote about Dr. Walley and MaterCare in September 2005.
Over at ProWomanProLife, Andrea Mrozek writes about Action Canada for Population Development’s pro-abortion agenda and its connections to like-minded groups and says:
This is inside baseball. But I know this and the Harper government should too. Reducing maternal mortality is laudable. Doing it by providing abortions is not.
It is deeply disturbing that the Harper government could not find better partners for the goal of reducing maternal and infant mortality. And while pro-abortion outfits such as the ACPD will argue that “safe, legal” abortions will reduce maternal deaths, there is evidence to the contrary.
