WUNRN
Devex International Development
Career Forum
Also Via the European Women's Lobby
EU DEVELOPMENT FUNDING FOR WOMEN'S
REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AT RISK
By Sophie in 't Veld, Petra Bayr - 27 March 2014
THE AUTHORS
Sophie in 't Veld
– Sophie in 't Veld has been a Dutch member of the European Parliament
since 2004 for the D66 party, part of the ALDE group. She is current vice-chair
of the committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs — LIBE, a member
of the parliamentary committee on women’s rights and gender equality and chair
of the parliamentary working group on sexual and reproductive health and rights
and HIV/AIDS. Previously, she was the ELDR group’s secretary general at the
Committee of the Regions.
Petra Bayr – Petra Bayr is
the Social Democrat Party — SPÖ spokesperson for global development and a
member of the Austrian Parliament since 2002. In 2012, she became Vice
President of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development and
is a member of the advisory group on HIV/AIDS and maternal and child health
with the Inter Parliamentarian Union. Bayr is also a founding member of the
Austrian Platform Against Female Genital Mutilation.
_________________________________________________________________
The immense potential for women in the developing world to build futures for themselves, their families and their communities is well documented.
Every additional year a girl spends in secondary school boosts
her earning potential by between 15 percent and 25 percent. And when they do
begin to earn, women generally invest 90 percent of their income on their
families.
But in order for women to be these builders of futures, they
must be healthy. And women are exposed to a major potential threat to health
that men are not — pregnancy.
Whereas in most rich, developed countries, medical support is
such that sports injuries and lifestyle diseases are more common than maternal
death, for many women in the world, pregnancy may still be life-threatening.
Indeed, almost 800 women in the developing world die every day during pregnancy
and childbirth — many as a result of unsafe abortion.
The frustrating and saddening thing is that the vast majority of
these deaths are preventable. This is why the international community
designated maternal health as a standalone Millennium Development Goal — and
why the European Union contributed $120 million to maternal health in 2012.
EU funding under threat
However, this EU funding may be threatened by an initiative
called "One of Us." This initiative aims to halt all EU funds for any
activities that involve the destruction of the human embryo.
Proponents claim that this can include EU development aid for
maternal health, since addressing this issue can — on occasion — lead to a need
for the provision of abortion services. The effect would be to stop EU funding
to safe and legal abortion services and activities that create awareness of
these legal services.
The initiative could also have a severe impact on other areas
that benefit from maternal health funding.
On the ground, abortion-related services are usually interlinked
with other services — including providing contraception, blood transfusions and
sexuality education. These services are usually provided by the same
organizations, and many of them receive their funding from the EU.
Mobilizing signatories
The mechanism being used to advance this campaign is the
European Citizens Initiative — a new procedure allowing EU citizens to organize
and collect 1 million signatures to request the European institutions to take
action in any given policy area.
Close scrutiny of the initiators and supporters of the
initiative reveals them to be almost exclusively ultra-conservative, religious
— both Catholic and U.S.-funded evangelical — organizations.
These organizations are attempting to impose their personal
religious beliefs on policies governing the general public — or in this case,
women in developing countries — regardless of whether or not those affected by
the policies share the same religious beliefs.
Having lost the battle against women’s rights in Europe — 25 out
of 28 EU member states today have liberal abortion laws — those behind the
initiative have had to look for a different way and a different part of the
world in which to promote their ideology and advance the anti-choice agenda.
And they are attempting to harness the EU — specifically its development policy
— in order to do so.
A tragic denial of reality
We can agree with the initiative’s signatories on one thing: We
all want to see the fewest number of abortions possible. However, the way in
which the campaign wishes to pursue this aim is not based in reality and —
rather than reducing it — would result in a great deal more suffering.
The initiative believes that once safe and legal abortion
services are denied to women, these women will simply carry their pregnancy to
full term. But this belief completely ignores the evidence of what happens in
abortion-restrictive jurisdictions and is predicated on a tragic denial of
reality.
Indeed, it is based on the same form of magical thinking that
believes gay people can be “re-educated” to be straight, or that abstinence is
a realistic form of contraception for most people. It also completely ignores
the rights of women and denies them a free choice.
Restricted access to abortion
Highly restrictive abortion regimes do not equate to lower
abortion rates. For example, in 2008, the abortion rate was 29 per 1,000 women
of childbearing age in Africa and 32 per 1,000 in Latin America — regions in
which abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of
countries.
The rate was 12 per 1,000 in western Europe, where abortion is
generally permitted on broad grounds. And women in European countries that do
have restrictive abortion regimes have the option of travelling to neighbouring
countries where abortion is legal.
Women have always had — and will continue to have — abortions.
When women are denied access to safe abortion services, they
will either travel to a place where safe and legal abortion is available, or
procure an unsafe abortion. Since this initiative targets the world’s poorest
women, the only option for them will be the latter — accessing backstreet
abortion practitioners or attempting to terminate the pregnancy themselves.
More than 20 million women — the vast majority of them in poor
countries — resort to unsafe abortion each year, usually involving the use of
sticks, wire hangers, poisons or inflicting physical trauma. An estimated
47,000 women die in the process — and 5 million require urgent medical
attention.
When access to abortion is restricted in a country, centers
providing safe abortion services are replaced by clinics full of women
suffering with appalling life-altering injuries. Few who visit these clinics
will subsequently deny the importance of access to safe abortion in the world’s
poorest countries.
The only proven way to reduce the number of abortions is through
the availability of modern means of contraception, the provision of family
planning and sexuality education. And yet, the One of Us initiative has the
potential to endanger EU development funds to these very areas.
Following the
Those behind the initiative have not plucked the idea out of
thin air. They are closely following a policy favored by Republican-led U.S
administrations, which ban federal money going to international groups that
perform abortions or provide abortion information.
This ban — known as the
Empirical
evidence from the World Health Organization, suggests that the
Contrary to international consensus
There is an international consensus on abortion, which states
that where abortion is legal, it should be safe. This was agreed by 179
governments — including all EU member states — at the 1994 International
Conference on Population and Development.
The One of Us initiative therefore seeks to undermine this
international consensus. The initiative is also is totally at odds with EU’s
longstanding development aid policy. As one of the leading international actors
supporting family planning and sexual and reproductive health, the EU has a
responsibility to stand up for these rights. Furthermore, it has obligations to
the ICPD process and to support developing countries to achieve the MDGs.
EU aid policy has saved the lives of millions of women and can
be considered one of the greatest achievements of the
We know the potential for women to be catalysts for change in
the developing world. We know for them to achieve this change, they must be
healthy. We know that family planning and reproductive health services —
including the availability of safe abortion — is essential to ensuring women’s
health. The evidence for this is clear and overwhelming…..