Mr. Speaker, a while ago in this House I asked the Minister of Health a question about maternal and child health. At the time, the government professed this to be at the heart of its millennium development goals that it wanted to achieve at the G8 and G20. It wanted to bring down the rates of maternal and child mortality.
While this was laudable in itself, I think many of us were concerned and were asking questions. Given that the four biggest causes of maternal death in developing countries are post-partum bleeding, infections, hypertension or chronic diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and unsafe abortion, which are recognized by the World Health Organization and physicians around the world, why was it that out of those four causes the government only picked three to deal with and ignored one?
We know that approximately 70,000 women a year die in the developing world from unsafe abortions and that the number of women in Canada who die from unsafe abortions is practically negligible, if there are any. I think it is zero at the moment.
Therefore, why would a government that professes to care about the health of mothers and their children presume that women in Canada deserve better than women in the developing world? Why would the government not understand and apply those same principles of care to women in the developing world, given that 70,000 women dying each year from unsafe abortions is an astounding number and given that we know these women need access to safe abortions, where legal. This in fact is one of the ways of achieving the millennium goals, which was to bring down the maternal mortality rate and to bring down the infant mortality rate?
We know that the millennium development goal looked at bringing down maternal mortality by 75% by the year 2015. In order for that to happen, the decline each year would have had to be about 5.5%. We have only achieved 2.3% annually, which means we are not going to achieve those millennium development goals.
When we know the four reasons for women dying and we are prepared to do something about three of them, the question is: Why would we ignore one of the most important ones that takes the lives of such a large number of women?
It means that we are not making these decisions based on evidence. When we seek to help women in the developing world, we are not making decisions in this country based on empirical data, based on information and knowledge that we hear from physicians and health care professionals. We are basing the decision on some sort of ideology, some sort of moral imperative. As a developed nation in which women have access to safe abortions whenever they need it, how dare we suggest that women in the developing world should not?
We also know that when women die in the developing world, their children under one year of age have an 80% chance of dying within a year of the mother's death. We know that children under five years of age have about a 50% chance of making it to adolescence. We are not just condemning the 70,000 women a year who need access to safe abortion; we are also condemning their children.
My question is: What makes these women and their children less worthy than the women who die from infection, chronic disease and hypertension, and post-partum hemorrhage? That is my question, and I am hoping to hear an answer to it this time.