HUGE Vatican FAIL

As long as I've been blogging on reproductive rights and justice (about seven years), there's been wrangling in Philippines over basic contraception and family planning.

And now it's over.

The Supreme Court in the Philippines has approved a birth control law, in a defeat for the Catholic Church.

The law requires government health centres to distribute free condoms and contraceptive pills.

The court had deferred implementation after the law's passage in December 2012 after church groups questioned its constitutionality.

Supporters of the law cheered as the court found that most of the provisions were constitutional.

The government of President Benigno Aquino defied years of church pressure by passing the bill.

It says the law will help the poor, who often cannot afford birth control, and combat the country's high rates of maternal mortality.

The provisions will make virtually all forms of contraception freely available at public health clinics.

Sex education will also be compulsory in schools and public health workers will be required to receive family planning training.

There will also be medical care for women who have had illegal abortions.

Abortion of course will still be illegal.

Here's the view from Manila.

The Catholic Church, which counts over 80 percent of the country’s 100 million population as members, had led street protests denouncing the law as “evil”, and at one point in its opposition campaign threatened Aquino with excommunication.

One of its hardline opponents and a petitioner to the court, former senator Francisco Tatad, said allowing the law to take effect could force Catholics into an open revolt.

“This means civil disobedience at the very least, actual revolt at the most extreme,” Tatad wrote in a commentary in the Manila Standard on Tuesday.

“Some of us will want to defy the power of the devil and die as martyrs, if need be, in the only cause that gives us a chance to fight for something much bigger than ourselves.”

Big talk.

All bullshit.

Nevertheless, many Catholics have embraced less conservative views in recent decades.

A recent survey carried by the respected Social Weather Stations polling group said about 84 percent of Filipinos agreed that the government should provide free family planning options such as contraceptives.

It said 72 percent were “in favor” of the law.

Another Vatican Taliban FAIL.

Motherhood Steve: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Rock:

Any discussions about maternal health should address issues of family planning and abortions, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.

Ms. Clinton made the comments during a news conference in Gatineau where G8 foreign ministers met this week.

Hard place:

The director of one of Canada's largest evangelical Christian lobby groups says Prime Minister Harper's decision to leave a door open for contraception aid in the plan could spark a backlash from a swath of social, fiscal, and church fundamentalists that numbers up to two or three million voters.

Looks good on him, doesn't it?


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What Do (Third World) Women Want? Part 2

Let's do some more listening to what women in the Third World want.

In Burkina Faso, there is new commitment to improving obstetric care and family planning.

As many as six women die every day in the West African country Burkina Faso as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, and human rights group, Amnesty International, says it is the country's poor, rural women whose lives are most in danger.

Amnesty International issued a report last month that pointed to poverty and shortages of supplies and trained medical staff as well as corruption and gender discrimination as the underlying causes for high rates of maternal death in Burkina Faso.

A 2005 law gives Burkinabé women the right to choose how many children they will have and when they will have them, and government subsidies introduced in 2006 sharply reduced the cost of childbirth.

But Amnesty International found that many women do not know about their right to family planning and that poorly paid medical personnel continue to ask for informal payments with impunity.

(snip)

The Burkinabé government also committed Friday to lifting financial barriers to family planning services, which Amnesty International says can save lives by preventing unwanted pregnancies, pregnancies that are too close together and unsafe, illegal abortions.

Wiki says it is 60% Muslim but calls it 'ethnically integrated, secular'. So, at least they don't have civil war and ethnic strife to deal with.

They're trying to raise the status of women there, but still need help.

Amnesty International has also encouraged international donors to continue their support of the Burkinabé government in ensuring the availability and accessibility of adequate reproductive care for women in Burkina Faso.

Now, let's go to Afghanistan where Motherhood Steve's government is more anti-choice than the mullahs.

Some mullahs in Afghanistan are distributing condoms. Others are quoting the Quran to encourage longer breaks between births. Health experts say contraception is starting to catch on in a country where one in eight women dies during pregnancy.

Afghanistan has one of the world's highest fertility rates, averaging more than six babies per woman despite years of war and a severe lack of medical care. Awareness of, and access to, contraceptives remains low among many couples, with UNICEF estimating 10 percent of women using some form of birth control.

But use of the pill, condoms and injected forms of birth control rose to 27 percent over eight months in three rural areas — up to half the woman in one area — once the benefits were explained one-on-one by health workers, according to the report published Monday in Bulletin, the World Health Organization's journal.

Canada's goal in Afghanistan is allll about the girls and women, right?

Just not the contraception, family planning, and access to safe abortion parts that saves women's lives, eh, Steve?

BONUS: Antonia Z has some choice (hee) words for Motherhood Steve's policy.

What Do (Third World) Women Want?

Anti-choice forces say Third World Women Don't Want Contraceptives, Expert Tells Canadian Politicians.

Well, let's listen to the those Third World women, shall we?

Uganda has run out of contraceptives.

She was 16 years when she had her first baby. In six years, she was a mother of four. Tired, she sought the help of a herbalist in vain. She was pregnant again before her little one was barely three months.

Desperate, she went to Mityana Health Centre III, but they had only pills. She could not take them because her husband did not approve of contraceptives. She was advised to use depo-povera - a type of contraceptive and was injected.

However, she discontinued the contraceptive after three months because of prolonged bleeding and frequent headaches. Now a mother of seven and probably still counting, her only hope lies in a permanent method, tubaligation, which her local facility cannot provide.

This is the story of Eseza Nabbanja, 37, wife to Dan Kaweesa of Myanzi subcounty in Mityana district. "I have been struggling to get a family planning method since 1997, long before anyone in this village knew about modern contraceptives.

My husband was against it because he wanted to have more children," Nabbanja says. She thinks the situation has improved because NGOs are educating locals about the benefits of family planning.

But the long-term contraceptives are rarely available at Mityana health centre. "You have to trek to Mityana Hospital which is about 25km away," she says.

In patriarchal societies, women resort to 'discreet' methods of contraception, like injectables and implants. Yet these are the types they are not getting.

A medical superintendent of a non-profit-making hospital with a family planning programme that serves more than 700 couples each month wrote to The New Vision about the plight.

He said for the last one year, the National Medical Stores (NMS) supplied the hospital with injections, oral contraceptive pills and implants. They also invested in staff who deliver family planning free of charge in hard-to-reach parts of the country.

Suddenly, NMS stopped supplying drugs to non-government health units.

The hospital was referred to the Joint Medical Stores (JMS), who said they do not stock contraceptives for religious reasons, thus the shortage.

"We purchased emergency supplies from PACE, but will have to pass their cost onto our patients," the source said.

Poor women with the highest need for family planning, cannot afford it.

A source from NMS who preferred anonymity says the drug body has run out of contraceptives.

One regional hospital 'has not had contraceptives for 10 months now'.

And while Tanzania has reduced its birth rate somewhat, it too is facing a country-wide shortage of contraceptives.

And these are news stories from just the last couple of days.

It may be that the situation will ease now that Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy, or Global Gag Rule, which denied US funding to any group that provided or even referred for abortion. And foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are helping too. Its website states:

Family planning saves lives.
One of the most cost-effective public health interventions available today is family planning. Voluntary family planning is a critical lifesaving intervention that can significantly improve the health of women and their families.

But Canada, once a beacon of sense and compassion, is now a laughing stock in the international community because of Motherhood Steve's Christo-Talibanny G8 maternal health thingy. And while he has walked back a bit from insisting that it was not atallatall about family planning, Third World women do want family planning. And they're not getting the contraceptives they want.

If It's Lives We Want to Save

So now we know why Motherhood Steve's maternal health initiative doesn't include family planning, let alone abortion.

"It does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning. Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to save lives," Mr. Cannon told the Foreign Affairs committee.

Family planning and saving women's and children's lives cannot be separated as anyone with a functioning brain and no rightwing religious base to appease knows. But instead of posting a bunch of sciency-facty links proving that, let's instead look at one of the countries where the new and (dis)improved maternal health initiative may be called on to operate.

Kenya is trying to wrangle itself a new constitution. It's not going that well. Old political factions still exist and, to make things worse, the church stepped in to stamp its feet over the possibility of abortion being allowed.

An op-ed today by Isaiah Esipisu is titled If it’s lives we want to save, let’s make abortion legal.

Issues touching on sex are treated discreetly, especially in Africa. People rarely want to talk about sex in public, lest they sound immoral.

The same applies to abortion. Government officials, church leaders, and nearly all Kenyans know well that it takes place in the backstreet under quacks.

They know of women who have died procuring an abortion unsafely, or some who have suffered the negative consequences of abortion. But they are afraid to talk about it in public, lest they sound immoral.

But, just like our teenagers usually discover sex on their own, studies from some African countries indicate that nearly 90 per cent of teenage girls know at least one crude method of procuring an abortion — a method they discovered on their own.

And they rarely discuss it with their elders or their parents, lest they sound immoral.

Expanding the scope for safe abortion services remains a delicate one. If any policy-maker supported the proposal of including it in the Constitution, their political opponents would definitely use it as a campaign tool to question their morality.

During the just-concluded East, Central and Southern African Health Ministers’ Conference in Kampala, Kenya’s director of medical services made it clear that Kenya was not going to allow abortion services to be conducted in any of the health centres, unless the life of the mother was in danger.

The subject is unsafe abortion and there are some gory details I'll spare you. Let's get to the numbers:

According to government estimates, more than 860 women procured unsafe abortions yesterday, and a similar number will do it again today, and again tomorrow. In short, 316,560 abortions are procured unsafely every year, where 20,000 of the women end up in hospital beds, while 2,600 of them die.

This costs the country’s health systems an estimated Sh18 million every year.

And now for the facty-sciency studies:

Evidence from countries with progressive safe abortion laws indicate that appropriate laws, policies and services can eliminate deaths and injuries.

South Africa is a good example, where even midwives are allowed to offer the services on demand, especially if the pregnancies are 12 weeks old or less.

As a result, government records indicate that the country has reduced the maternal mortality rates due to unsafe abortion by 91 per cent since 1997, when the law was passed.

Abortion is lawful in Ghana, if the pregnancy is a result of rape, defilement or incest. It is also allowed if continued pregnancy would put the woman at risk, or where the child is likely to develop an abnormality. The same applies in Ethiopia and Zambia.

Maternal mortality in these countries due to unsafe abortions has reduced. Kenya may need to borrow a leaf and address abortion, not immorality.

Ah, I can hear Bev Odious and Lawrence LooseCannon now: 'What does this guy know? We in the developed world know what's good for these poor people and that's what they're going to get, even if we have to shove it down their throats.'

Oh. Wait. I'm wrong. That's what LifeShite said about Ignatieff's demand that the initiative address abortion.

And, if safe abortion saves lives, how many more would be saved by offering family planning so that women who don't want to get pregnant can take sensible measures to avoid it?

Hope in the Philippines

The Philippines has a population problem.

With an estimated population of about 92 million people, the Philippines is the world's 12th most populous country. It is estimated that there are an additional 11 million overseas Filipinos worldwide.

It is also 80-85% Roman Catholic.

Legislators there have been trying to formulate a family planning policy for eight years, but the Catlick Church keeps stamping its tiny feet and thwarting all efforts.

The Philippines’ population growth rate of 1.90 percent from 2005 to 2010 is still among the highest in East Asia, although this has gone down from 2.3 percent in the nineties. In a country that has no clear policy on family planning and population, more than 4,000 babies are added to its population every day.

In poorer areas, women have as many as six to seven children due to the lack of access and information to modern methods of family planning in the last decade. Depending on which government was in power, local clinics were giving out information about contraception that included condoms or were instructed to avoid doing so.

Incumbent President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who came to power with the backing of the Church, has consistently emphasised natural family planning – including abstinence –and "responsible parenthood" over modern methods.

(She herself has just two children.)

In May they're having a presidential election. There are nine candidates, only three of whom 'seem' to be in favour of a reproductive health policy, according to that article, 'based on their track records and public pronouncements'. (The article is silent on whether the others are opposed or just too intimidated to say.)

In late 2009, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) warned the electorate not to vote for candidates who favour the reproductive health bill. "It would not be morally permissible to vote for candidates who support anti-family policies, including reproductive health," said the CBCP's Catechism on Family and Life for the 2010 Elections.

So, that seems to be it. The Catlick Church will continue to oppose rational measures to control population growth and the Philippines will continue to export its people overseas to work and send dough home.

Oh. Wait. Looky here.

Seven in 10 Filipinos would defy the powerful Roman Catholic church and elect a president who supported the use of condoms and pills for birth control, according to survey released Friday.

Heavily Catlick countries around the world -- Spain, Portugal, Mexico, to mention a few -- are crawling out from centuries of the church's vicious misogyny, homophobia, and general opposition to sex and freedom. We hope the politicians of the Philippines are listening to their people.

Bang for the buck

Wow. Did you hear? Money spent on family planning prevents unintended pregnancies!

From the Guttmacher Institute:

By providing millions of young and low-income women access to voluntary contraceptive services, the national family planning program prevents 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies, each year. These pregnancies would result in 860,000 unintended births, 810,000 abortions and 270,000 miscarriages, according to a new Guttmacher Institute report.

Absent publicly funded family planning services, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher than it currently is, and nearly twice as high among poor women.

Publicly funded family planning services are highly cost-effective. More than nine in 10 women receiving them would be eligible for Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery and postpartum care services if they became pregnant. Avoiding the significant costs associated with these unintended births saves taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent on family planning.
. . .

More than nine million women received publicly funded contraceptive services in 2006. Most (7.2 million) received their care from the national network of family planning centers. Another two million women received Medicaid-funded family planning care from private doctors. Six in 10 women who get care at a family planning center, including three out of four who are poor, consider the center to be their usual source of health care, according to the report.

“Many low-income women get their basic health care for the year during an annual visit to a family planning center,” says Gold. “The package of services they receive not only includes contraceptive counseling and the provision of a contraceptive method. It also includes pelvic and breast exams, tests for HIV and other STIs, screenings for reproductive cancers, high blood pressure and diabetes, and referrals to other health providers when necessary. This is essential, preventive health care for disadvantaged women.”

Sound like pretty good bang for the buck, doesn't it?

But natch, the forced-pregnancy gang at LifeShite isn't buying this sciency stuff. Here's the headline: 'Pro-Abortion Group Falsely Claims Family Planning Programs Reduce Abortions'.

In looking for more reaction, I was amused to find this at a site that includes Five Feet of Racism as its 'Conservative Politics Watchdog'.

This is as excited as their reporter got:

The Guttmacher Institute is generally respected by experts and activists who do not share its advocacy of abortion rights. However this report favoring more funding for family planning may not be met with applause.

Ooh, take that you nasty generally respected institute!