Madam Speaker, on March 26 I asked the government about its plans to include contraceptive health in its G8 child and maternal health initiative. Since then the government has conceded that access to contraceptives should be included. I am very pleased that it has realized that access to contraception can reduce maternal mortality by 70%.
However, the government has continued to refuse access to abortion under the plan, despite knowing that more than half a million women die every year in developing countries because of unwanted pregnancies, including 55,000 women from botched abortions. We should note that these figures are based on reporting rates that are traditionally very poor.
This is completely unacceptable, but of even more concern, according to the Canadian International Development Agency, is that 2.5 million teenagers worldwide have unsafe abortions, and those young women face, to a very significant degree, serious complications that are often life threatening.
No one is fooled about the underlying reasons for this. It is clearly ideologically based. Because of this, lives are at risk and the cycle of links between poverty and child and maternal health issues continues.
The government ignored advice from domestic and international experts when it excluded abortion funding from its G8 maternal and child health initiative, including CIDA, UNICEF and World Vision.
The risk of a woman dying as a result of pregnancy or childbirth is one in seven in the poorest parts of the world, but it is more than 80% preventable, and this is what the Royal Society of Canada is saying. To go back to contraception, this week it said:
Provision of effective contraception for approximately 200 million who have none will prevent 23 million unplanned births, 22 million induced abortions and 14,000 pregnancy-related maternal deaths each year.
This evidence is so irrefutable, it is there in black and white, but when I originally asked the government a question about contraception and maternal health, it said it would not even fund contraception. Now it says yes; but do we trust it to keep its promises?
Further, the government does not have the support of Canadians on this issue. The Canadian Press-Harris/Decima poll found this month that only 30% of respondents would support the government's decision excluding abortion funding from the G8 initiative.
Thus the government is rejecting the advice of Canadians, it is rejecting the advice of experts, and it is rejecting the advice of other G8 countries and G8 governments, like the U.S. and the U.K. who have come out against our government's decision.
Further addressing child and maternal health, we have to get serious about poverty. We need to come together on this issue as we approach the deadline for the millennium development goals that aim to reduce extreme poverty around the world by 2015. We need to increase funding to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, all of which have links to child and maternal health. The Canadian share would be about $700 million over the next three years.
While Canada has followed through on its 2005 commitments to increase aid to Africa, we continue to be at risk of falling back to previous levels of inaction, because the government is freezing its current contributions at 2010 levels for five years.
All of these issues are linked. Therefore, my question to the government is, will it stop with its ideologically driven agenda and take a comprehensive approach to child and maternal health in the global south?