Abortion aid to nations is harmful and obscene

THE day I gave birth to my eighth child, I came the closest I have to death.

I had a post-partum haemorrhage. This is a common complication among women who have had multiple births, but fortunately I was a patient in an Australian hospital so I was treated immediately.

A delivery such as that kills one woman almost every minute of the day in the developing world. Most maternal deaths are directly attributable to four causes: haemorrhage, which is the biggest danger (25 per cent of deaths), infection (15 per cent), hypertension (12 per cent) and obstructed labour (8 per cent). Where women work hard through their pregnancies on poor nutrition, as in Africa, they have the highest rate of miscarriage in the world. In such a climate, abortion is a desperate last resort. It is surprising that the rate of death from septic abortion is not higher than 13per cent of deaths.

In the under-developed world, pregnancy and labour are still life-threatening parts of women's lives. Yet they have many children.

Close to home, East Timor has a fertility rate of 6.7, the highest birthrate in the world. At this point the ostensibly enlightened Western view parts company with the reality of life for women in a place such as East Timor.

The Australian parliamentary group on population and development, led by Labor senator Claire Moore and federal Liberal MP Mal Washer - who was one of those instrumental in having the abortion drug RU486 made available in Australia - has recommended to Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith that aid must be directed more towards family planning, or reproductive health as it is termed, and that might include abortion. It is supported by the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance.

The pro-abortion mentality of these advocacy groups targets pregnancy as a dangerous condition, to be treated by "safe abortion" rather than targeting the disturbing lack of prenatal care, vaccines, trained midwives, centres equipped for obstetric complications and transportation to those centres. In the obsession to expand abortion services for the poorest women, the groups ignore the fundamentals of prenatal and postnatal care.

Indeed, a paper setting out arguments against the present aid guidelines that was supplied by Christina Richards, an independent consultant on reproductive health, to the parliamentary group for its meeting with Smith last month, advocates against integration: "Where family planning components are integrated in other projects, (for example) mother and child health, the impact is reduced quality of the whole project because of the fear factor and inability to deliver the range of information and services needed to get results."

From their sanitised Western heights, the logic of this self-appointed group simply equates to fewer children and fewer pregnancies, with better outcomes for everybody. But is that really so?

The problem with this thinking is that it regards having children as the central problem of these women's lives, but it isn't. Instead, there is the painful fact so many of the children they bear don't grow up, which we in the West are not faced with and don't comprehend: poverty and disease kills their children. With a complete lack of health care, women must also risk their lives to have more children.

Children are not the problem for these women; children are the answer. The difference between my experience and that of a woman in Africa is good health care. Poverty and a lack of health care is not cured by family planning, especially not by the kind of ruthless, reductionist approach of the modern population planners, who are not interested in only maternal and child health. What place does abortion have in good health care for women who want children but have no adequate health care?

For the poor and the powerless, abortion is obviously the last resort. To portray it as a right and a coldly rational decision - of the Western feminists and population planners - is perverse in the extreme.

In the past, this sort of logic has been used to support aggressive family planning in China, Africa and Peru, where UN-sponsored programs ran roughshod over culture and religion and were halted only when women died after mass tubal ligations. No wonder they were defunded.

In agreeing to the program of action at the UN international conference on population and development in Cairo in 1994, Australia, along with all other members of the international community, made a commitment to provide reproductive health for the poorest women, but this did not include funds for aborting their children.

Since Cairo, the meaning of reproductive health has gradually changed. It has been reinterpreted by pro-abortion groups that claim it includes a right to abortion. They claim that the Cairo conference reached a global consensus endorsing abortion as a way to combat overpopulation and poverty. This cannot be reconciled with the conference's formal requirement that governments make every effort "to reduce the recourse to abortion".

The aim of the parliamentary group is potentially contrary to this requirement because scrapping former senator Brian Harradine's ban on the use of aid funds for information and services about abortion could result in funding that includes money for abortion.

The politicians' group is backed by the ARHA, which includes abortion providers, and the leading family planning organisation represented at the group's seminar last year was Marie Stopes International, one of the world's biggest abortion providers.

However, the biggest supplier of aid in the Pacific, the Catholic organisation Caritas, was not consulted. The Australian head of Caritas heard a rumour of their plans last year and the director of Caritas East Timor, Mark Green, first heard of it when I rang. He was appalled.

"The subjects of development aid should also be the ones to determine the mode and the manner of their own development ... in the East Timor context, espousing or funding abortion (as a development activity) would be seen as doing harm" as well as being paternalistic, he says.

Since the Cairo conference, more than five million women have died due to a lack of basic health care during pregnancy and more than 90 million children have died from preventable diseases. The call from Washer's malcontents for 10 per cent of Australia's aid budget to be assigned to "sexual reproductive health" is not just plain silly but obscenely irresponsible.