McLeod Group Blog, May 25, 2014
The Harper government’s Muskoka Initiative is based on the fact that “women and children in developing countries are significantly more likely to die from simple, preventable causes, due to lack of proven, affordable and cost effective solutions that most Canadians take for granted,” as the Canadian government puts it.
The idea was—and is—that by committing major funding, Canada and other donor governments can significantly reduce child mortality and the number of women who die during childbirth. Exaggerations notwithstanding about the volume of new money brought by Canada to the challenge, the premise is good as far as it goes. It is worth doing. But there is a huge hole in the middle of it: human rights.
Foreign Minister John Baird has railed against the forced early marriage of girls, but he goes no farther because he and the government don’t want to open a discussion about choice—the choice a woman has, or should have, about whether to get married, to use contraception or to take an unwanted pregnancy to term. In fact, the Canadian government has refused to discuss or to fund initiatives that deal with these issues and the kind of “solutions that most Canadians take for granted.”
The World Health Organization says that 21.6 million women experience an unsafe abortion worldwide each year, 85% of them in developing countries. Every year, some 47,000 women die of complications from unsafe abortion. This represents close to 13% of all maternal deaths. The Muskoka Initiative has absolutely nothing to say about this and Canada won’t put a dime towards stopping it.
And why are there so many unsafe abortions? Because millions of women don’t know their rights and, worse, in many cases don’t have access to those rights: legal rights, sexual and reproductive rights, human rights. They don’t have access to family planning services, education or the options “that most Canadians take for granted.”
The Boko Haram kidnapping in Nigeria has excited world attention over the plight of 200 girls, when in fact violence is a fact of life for hundreds of thousands of girls in a more silent, but no less terrible way every year.
Not only does the Muskoka initiative ignore these issues, Canada, once a leader in the promotion of gender awareness and women’s rights internationally, has pushed the subject off the agenda as though it never existed. We have become instead a choirmaster for the promotion of technical approaches to problems that are often deeply embedded in systemic human rights abuse.
None of this is mentioned by the NGOs serving as Mr. Harper’s choir: Plan, World Vision, CARE and others. And it’s likely that none of it will be discussed at Mr. Harper’s “summit” on maternal, newborn and child health at the end of May.
Its theme, ironically, is “Saving Every Woman, Every Child.” Well, maybe not every woman. And maybe not every child bride.