Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to spend 63 million taxpayer dollars promoting reproductive health overseas. A drop in the bucket, certainly, but it is the ideological nature of the expenditure that would rankle most Americans. The good news is that at least 35 percent of their rationale just went up in smoke.
The Obama administration and their pro-choice United Nations allies long before them have been using a highly inflated number of maternal deaths as a rationale for the need to liberalize abortion laws around the world. They assert and their allies have asserted for years that more than 500,000 women die every year in pregnancy. Researchers at the Universtiy of Washington–funded by Bill and Melinda Gates and published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet–disagree, and this has roiled an already roiling global debate.
The Lancet reports in an article just out that the more accurate figure of global maternal deaths is 342,900 and this includes some 60,000 who die each year of HIV/AIDs while pregnant. So the actual figure is much lower. The Lancet article charges that the old UN numbers resulted from inadequate death reporting, mostly in poor countries, and bad statistical modeling on behalf of researchers. They also might have said wishful thinking, because nothing revs up the international funding machine than large death statistics.
The new number has profound implications for a global fight over money and whether the right choices are made to save women’s lives. So controversial is the new number that The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, told the New York Times that unnamed activists actually pressured him to hold back the report until three UN funding conferences finish up, including one that ended last week at UN headquarters.
Shaky and even ideological numbers are not new to the international policy debate. Just look at Climategate. While the maternal health movement claimed that 99 percent of maternal deaths occurred in the developing world, the UN’s own Population Division asserted that most of those countries do not even report cause of death or sex of the deceased with any accuracy and, almost alone at the UN, refused to use the 500,000 number.
The Lancet study also refutes the claim, made by the “safe motherhood” movement, that “safe” abortion is one of the best ways to decrease maternal deaths. Instead the report backs what were formerly mainstream but increasingly politically marginalized views that in order to save women’s lives in pregnancy they need skilled birth attendants, higher levels of general medical and health care, and higher levels of education. These views have not fit in with what some call the “abortion first” strategy of the UN agencies behind the maternal mortality and safe motherhood movements.
The “safe motherhood” strategy has been to steamroll opposition by finding powerful allies at the UN, European Union, and major U.S. foundations. Further, they have sought to marginalize opposition, from the Catholic church and others, as anti-science and merely “ideological.” Proponents have also used highly “adjusted” data to back their claims, and rushed their agenda onto major donor conferences like the G8.
For eight years the movement had to fight the Bush administration, not to mention the UN General Assembly, both of which rejected including reproductive health in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). But activists managed to surreptitiously insert reproductive health into the MDGs through a report that was adopted but never debated by the General Assembly in October 2008.
The Obama administration was to be the movement’s savior, and events bore this out almost immediately. Once in office, Obama announced he would siphon off funding from HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria to pay for global reproductive health.
On December 7, the White House announced it would fold the Bush administration’s hugely successful President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) into the $63 billion Global Health Initiative. Soon after, Clinton announced that the initiative would focus on reproductive health. In Congressional testimony she said that, yes, reproductive health in U.S. foreign policy includes abortion as far as she is concerned.
Thus, the U.S. fulfilled one of the activists’ major goals–to divert funding from other global health pandemics into reproductive health. According to the new Lancet study, this could create a drastic increase in maternal deaths given that 60,000 of the 342,900 maternal deaths were due to HIV/AIDS.
The Obama administration has not been shy about badgering other countries to get in line. At the G8 ministerial a few weeks ago, Clinton took Prime Minister Stephen Harper to task for keeping family planning and abortion out of Canada’s G8 agenda.
Harper is their worst kind of foe: He wants to make maternal health his country’s “signature issue” at the summit, but refuses to accept the reproductive health agenda. Yet, after Clinton’s meddling, Harper said he would reconsider. And so the movement gained even more steam going into the G8 summit, not to mention the huge UN Women Deliver conference set for Washington, D.C., this June, and a further maternal mortality funding debate set for the UN General Assembly this fall.
All that changed with last week’s surprise publication in The Lancet. And this explains why the movement lobbied The Lancet’s editor to have the study’s release delayed until after all these meetings were over. By refusing, Horton essentially rolled a boulder in front of a runaway train.
But the game isn’t over yet. The UN is due to release its own report, based on the now discredited 526,300 number, and no doubt their researchers are working feverishly to shoot holes in the credibility of the Lancet study. With the G8 fast approaching, the clock running out on UN development goals, and Obama’s slipping approval ratings making a second term less inevitable, these are desperate times and call for desperate measures.
Austin Ruse is president and Susan Yoshihara is vice president for research at C-FAM (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute), a research institute focusing on international social policy based in New York and Washington, D.C.
