LONDON, June 28, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A major international aid charity’s claim that more contraception and “family planning” is the solution to maternal deaths in the developing world is “false, illogical and unfounded,” the UK’s leading pro-life group has said.
Save the Children (SCF) has issued a report claiming, “Pregnancy is the biggest killer of teenage girls worldwide.”
“Every year one million teenage girls die or suffer serious injury, infection or disease due to pregnancy or childbirth,” the report said, and went on to recommend fulfilling the “unmet need for family planning” as the solution to maternal morbidity.
The report cited statistics that “girls under 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy than women in their 20s. Babies born to younger mums are also at far greater risk and around one million babies born to adolescent girls die every year – babies are 60% more likely to die if their mother is under 18.”
But Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, responded to the claims, saying that they are “simply not backed by the studies [SCF] references in its report.”
“It is misleading to say that pregnancy or childbirth are in general causes of death. Haemorrhage, sepsis and infection may cause death. In most cases, death and serious injury can be averted by good maternity care, such as trained birth attendants, blood transfusion [and] antibiotics,” Tully said.
The same applies to child mortality, he observed. “Babies in the developing world die because of lack of good maternity and newborn care. This will continue whether young women use contraception or not.”
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With this report, SCF appears to be positioning itself as a player in the population control lobby, saying they are “urging world leaders to increase the global availability of contraceptives” and to ensure that “women are empowered to decide when to have children through education and the law.”
Anthony Ozimic, SPUC’s communications manager, said that the “unmet need for family planning,” which for leftist organization typically includes artificial contraceptives, as well as abortion and sterilizations, is a myth invented by the international abortion/contraception lobby. Groups like the UNFPA, International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the World Health Organisation regularly use the concept to push national governments to comply with birth control programs.
The assumption, he said, is that every woman who is not trying to get pregnant but is not using contraception automatically has an “unmet need” for it. The reality, he said, is that rich and powerful ideologues are pushing “a decadent Western ideology of sexual liberation onto poor, vulnerable, culturally conservative societies.”
“Yet even the Save the Children report has a whole chapter entitled ‘Stimulating demand for family planning’. That’s not to deny that there are some cultural practices which should be addressed, such as coercion of teenage girls. But contraception doesn’t address that problem – it may even help to hide the evidence of abuse, help to enable it to continue.”
The report relies heavily upon claims by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Population Reference Bureau, the Guttmacher Institute – an offshoot of Planned Parenthood – and the Population Council, as well as officials in the relevant sections of WHO, UNICEF and DFID. These groups, Ozimic says, are effectively one: the international abortion-contraception lobby.
While the report names Somalia as an example of a country in which high fertility and population growth are linked to high child mortality, SPUC points out that Somalia is one of the “failed states,” in a constant state of violent crisis, without a central government or infrastructure, let alone a healthcare system. Similar deficiencies exist in governance and healthcare provision in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
“Save the Children should not be exploiting the negative cultural practices which have been linked to those cultures (e.g. coercion of teenage girls) to promote population control,” Ozimic said.
In related news, another major player in the international abortion/population control lobby, Marie Stopes International, has praised the British minister for foreign aid for his comments boosting contraception in poor countries.
The UK government is currently working with another of the leading population control lobbyists, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a Family Planning Summit to be held in London early next month. In preparation for this, the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, presented Parliament with the Global Impact Report prepared by Marie Stopes “that clearly demonstrates the benefits of contraception” in the developing world.
“Access to contraception,” the Marie Stopes report claims, is 20 per ent in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mitchell said, “This important report, which comes just two weeks before The London Summit on Family Planning, is a valuable piece of research that clearly demonstrates the benefits of contraception and why we are working to provide access to family planning for an additional 120 million of the world’s poorest women who want it.”
Marie Stopes enjoys massive government contracts to provide abortion and contraceptives in countries with high rates of birth as well as high maternal mortality and morbidity.