Friday Fax
January 29, 2009 | Volume 12, Number 7
Dear Colleague,
We report today on UNICEF's new annual report
which sadly once more promotes not child survival
but women's rights. Moreover, they peddle what
they oddly admit is the phony number of 500,000+
annual deaths due to pregnancy related issues. Poor UNICEF; poor us.
We also report on Barack Obama and his decision
to begin funding abortions around the world.
Spread the word.
Yours sincerely,
Austin Ruse
President
UNICEF Report Ignores Child Survival, Focuses on
Dangers of Childbearing to Women
By Susan Yoshihara
(NEW YORK - C-FAM) The UN children’s
agency, UNICEF, launched its annual report this
week claiming that, “Having a child remains one
of the biggest health risks for women worldwide,”
and dedicated the 168-page flagship publication
to the issue of maternal mortality, virtually
ignoring the agency’s mandate of child survival.
The report recommends increased global financing
of UN initiatives aimed at “family planning” and
“reproductive health services” as the primary way
to reduce maternal deaths, but also provides
extensive evidence that there is no reliable data to substantiate its claims.
Entitled, “The State of the World’s
Children 2009: Maternal and Newborn Health,” the
study addresses the problem of 536,000 maternal
and 4.7 million newborn annual deaths worldwide
focusing on Africa, Asia and Latin America. Yet,
the report undercuts at length the validity of
its own statistics, stating that a “high degree
of uncertainty for maternal mortality ratios
indicates that all data points should be
interpreted cautiously,” and saying “The [UN’s]
2005 maternal mortality estimates are far from
perfect,” merely reflecting “a strong commitment
on the part of the international community to
continually strive for greater accuracy and
precision.” And while it argues that “more than
99 per cent” of maternal deaths “occurred in
developing countries,” it goes on to call
“commonplace” the absence of data to make such a claim.
In fact, the report admits that only 35
percent of the data used to create the 536,000
number in 2005 was based upon “complete/good”
data. A full 35 percent of the 171 countries
surveyed to create the number had “no data.”
Another 20 percent of the total maternal
mortality figure was from “estimates” and “uncertain/poor data.”
Another contradiction in the report is its
discussion of abortion. According to the report,
abortion complications are the smallest
contributor to maternal death in every one of the
three developing regions studied. By contrast,
hemorrhaging is the cause of nearly 30 percent of
maternal deaths in all three regions, followed by
hypertension and sepsis. Undefined “other causes”
account for nearly a third of deaths in Africa
and one fifth of the deaths in Asia and Latin America.
Contradicting this evidence, the report
calls for a “continuum of care” that promotes
“reproductive health services,” a term used by
some UN officials to include abortion. It then
puts at the top of its eleven recommended
interventions for reducing maternal deaths
“promoting access to family planning services,
based on individual country policies,” with
skilled birth attendants and emergency obstetric
care mentioned as lower priorities.
The report also claims that in 2005, heads
of state created “a specific target on
reproductive health: Millennium Goal 5, Target
B,” which seeks to “Achieve, by 2015, universal
access to reproductive health” and includes
“contraceptive prevalence rate,” and “unmet need
for family planning,” as indicators of attaining
the target. The UN Population Fund,
contradictorily, claims that such a target was
created in 2008. In fact, the heads of state
rejected the target in 2005, and have never voted on or adopted such a target.
This is the second consecutive UNICEF
annual report devoted to women’s rights rather
than child survival. Experts attribute the
organization’s transformation from a
service-delivery organization to a
rights-activist agency to its adopting a
“rights-based approach” some two decades ago. The
adoption of the approach was a bureaucratic
decision that includes the active promotion of
both the Women’s Convention (CEDAW) and the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
Obama Clears Way for U.S. Funding of Abortion Overseas
By Samantha Singson
(NEW YORK - C-FAM ) On his third day in
office, U.S. president Barack Obama fulfilled his
promise to abortion rights groups by issuing an
executive rescinding the Mexico City Policy that
protected American taxpayers from funding
abortion overseas. Obama’s executive order makes
international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) that promote and perform abortions in
developing countries eligible for public funds.
Considered by many to be one of the most
effective pro-life policies of the Reagan and
Bush administrations, the Mexico City policy
required that NGOs pledge they would not “perform
or promote abortion” in order to qualify for
family planning funds from the U.S. Agency for
International Development. International Planned
Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the largest
abortion provider in the world, estimates that it
has lost more than $100 million in funding because of the policy.
Abortion rights groups targeted the Mexico
City Policy, which they disparagingly call the
“global gag rule,” even before President Obama
officially took office. Just after the November
election, a coalition of abortion advocacy groups
submitted a secret 55-page memo to the
President-elect outlining policy recommendations
to advance "reproductive rights" in the first 100
days of his new administration. Striking down
the Mexico City Policy was at the top of their wish list.
Twenty two pro-life organizations issued a
press release condemning Obama’s executive order
as “nothing less than a bailout of the abortion
industry, taking money away from grassroots
organizations that truly help women and children
in order to fund two radical abortion lobbyists
in particular – International Planned Parenthood
Federation and Marie Stopes International.”
Pro-life leaders in the developing world
also criticized the executive order. Dr. Doreen
Brady-West, an obstetrician gynecologist and
chairwoman of Jamaica’s Coalition for the Defense
of Life, told the Friday Fax that by choosing
Obama, Americans have also “chosen a social
policy that will take their nation toward the
establishment of the post-modern (and
anti-Christian) worldview as a cultural norm.”
Dr. West concluded that President Obama's
policies would “also strengthen the hands of
those agencies that intend to export and enforce
a culture of secular humanism in unwilling
developing countries, with all the attendant
implications for the family and for the most
vulnerable human beings at the extremes of their natural life.”
The abortion coalition is likely to see
another item ticked off their wish list in the
coming months. In a statement that accompanied
the executive order to rescind the Mexico City
Policy, President Obama stated that he will be
“working with Congress to restore US financial
support of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).” Since
2002, the US has withheld $244 million from UNFPA
because of evidence that the organization is
involved in and supportive of China’s draconian
one-child policy that includes forced abortions and sterilizations.
UNFPA executive director Thoraya Obaid
boasted this week that the organization is
“confident that under the new President's
direction, the U.S. will resume its leadership in
promoting and protecting women's reproductive health and rights worldwide.”
For more news, visit us at
<http://www.c-fam.org/track/trackurl.asp?q=7AA5A4D9495E145F20054A16D9756CDDEA49FA9DA3AC063EE17D8D46BEA8E43F24F2301100C3F38B17AC3C53B708C7504FAE536063F2655D60F3A9AE805CC39E>www.c-fam.org.
Editor in Chief – Austin Ruse
Managing Editor – Piero Tozzi
Assistant Managing Editor – Hannah Russo
Chief Correspondent – Samantha Singson
Contributor – Susan Yoshihara
© Copyright 2008 Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.
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+ "The fruit of abortion is nuclear war" - Bl. Mother Teresa +
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