The new maternal health report endorses a UN strategy that recommends “safe” abortion services and family planning alongside antenatal care and skilled attendants at birth.  That strategy was based on previous UN reports that said 536,000 women died yearly from pregnancy-related causes, 78,000 from illegal abortion. The new report slashes the total to 358,000 and did not offer any data regarding abortion.

“This is specious,” Duke University’s Dr. Monique Chireau said. “There were no data collected on deaths from abortion. We can’t even get good data on maternal deaths.”

The report says that only 63 of 173 countries studied had complete records on a cause of death. Twenty-four had no records at all.

Critics say the UN issued the report because of a recent independent study that showed previous UN data suspect and its research methods flawed. That independent study found that better education, economics, and healthcare, along with lower fertility rates, led to better maternal health. It did not mention abortion or family planning.

At a conference in June, International Planned Parenthood’s Sharon Camp asked one of the authors of the independent study if abortion and family planning contributed to lower maternal deaths. The author, Dr. Christopher Murray, replied that it would be hard to find evidence to support that belief.

While the most recent UN report found the same lower number of maternal deaths as the independent study, its research methods remain murky. While the UN report includes a comparison of study methods, Chireau said it leaves readers more confused about the UN’s approach. “They talk about process. What process? Where are the additional data sets?”

A former UN reproductive health official said promoting abortion services stems from a belief by most UN staff that legalizing abortion makes it safer and does not increase its incidence. Dr. Guiseppe Benagiano, formerly of the World Health Organization, acknowledged that abortion rates have increased after legalization in a number of countries.

Complete data is available for countries where abortion is illegal and maternal deaths low, such as Chile, Ireland, Malta, and Poland. Pro-life analysts say the research links tighter abortion laws with better maternal health. The new UN report, meanwhile, shows maternal deaths are higher than previously estimated in India, where abortion is legal and widespread.

Sixty-five percent of all maternal deaths occur in 11 countries, including India, according to the report. Three states with the highest rates of maternal death rates are torn by war or suffer from failed governments.

While it does not offer an evidentiary link, the new UN report says that higher contraceptive prevalence “may have contributed to improved outcomes.” Chireau called that misleading because a decrease in HIVAIDS-related deaths is a big factor behind lower maternal deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

The UN report puts HIVAIDS-related maternal deaths at 21,000, one-third the number found by the independent researchers. It acknowledges that the figure was “difficult to estimate directly from available study data.”

A new report abandons statistics fiercely defended just months ago. In April, an independent research team showed that UN leaders had for years inflated the number of maternal deaths to a half-million worldwide.

The new UN report mirrors the independent study, putting the number around 350,000 and falling. The change highlights the tension between the UN’s dual roles in research and policy making, as one researcher told of jetting overnight to make statistics match policy.

The UN finds itself having to accept the lower maternal death figures just as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tries to rally $169 billion in new funding for maternal and child health.

“The independent report was an embarrassment for the World Health Organization,” said Dr. Donna Harrison, president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Harrison said WHO’s credibility had suffered when the small research team produced more accurate data.

When the medical journal Lancet published the independent findings, the editor told the New York Times that advocates pressured him not to publish it until after this week’s summit on UN development goals in New York.

UN researchers and women’s rights groups confronted the authors of the Lancet study at a meeting in Washington last June, asking them to get in line with UN statistics so as not to confuse the media and big donors.

UN leadership was in disarray over how to react. WHO head Margaret Chan misquoted the report as saying legal abortion reduced maternal deaths. In fact, the report never mentioned abortion or family planning and credited better economic development, education, better health care and lower birth rates as factors.

The head of the UN Population Fund and WHO’s top statistician had offered conflicting views about whether the UN report would reflect the lower numbers or stick to the 500,000 figure. Activists at the recent UN-backed Women Deliver conference rolled their eyes and actually laughed at the independent report’s findings and urged UN officials not to accept them.

While the major finding differs little between the two reports, the Lancet study hailed the one-third drop in maternal deaths as “substantive” progress, but the UN characterized it as “modest.”  And the UN report recommends funding family planning and abortion, even though it acknowledges no evidentiary link to maternal health.

The UN report explicitly compares its methodology to the Lancet study, but it does not reveal research methods. One difference is that national governments weighed in on its initial findings before final analysis and publication.

“The [independent] study was very objective with how they obtained their data. WHO’s process was not completely transparent,” Duke University’s Dr. Monique Chireau said.

UN scientists say they have to balance publishing their findings with gaining support for UN policies. One researcher said he got an emergency call and flew all night from Geneva to an African capital. He changed that country’s maternal death statistics after hearing how the numbers would negatively affect hitting UN development targets.

The independent study authors suggested that UN peers quit making policy and focus on research, Dr. Chireau said.

The appointment of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet as Under Secretary General of UN Women has garnered praise from several abortion advocacy groups.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, commonly known as UN Women, was established on July 2nd when the General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution that consolidated four UN bodies on women’s issues.

The creation of this super-agency for women’s issues is largely attributed to the lobbying efforts of the Global Campaign for Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR), a coalition of abortion proponents. Not only was the GEAR campaign instrumental in founding UN Women, the organization reportedly had a heavy hand in the selection process of the new under secretary general, providing the secretary general a list of questions for candidate interviews.
Charlotte Bunch, a founding member and leading advocate of the GEAR campaign, calls Bachelet a “top notch choice” who was one of GEAR’s “dream candidates.” Additionally, Bachelet’s appointment received praise from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who said that Bank ki-Moon’s choice “sends a clear message to the global community that women’s rights and equality will be considered at the highest level of deliberation on international human rights.”

Bachelet was viewed as the front-runner when UN Women was established. As president of Chile, Bachelet supported the possibly abortion-inducing “morning after pill,” and she was the honorary co-chair of the recent UN-backed pro-abortion Women Deliver conference in Washington, D.C.

The secretary general’s short list for the head of the new organization was laden with abortion advocates. Rosario Manalo was one of the longest serving members of the controversial committee that oversees the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). During her tenure, the CEDAW committee pressured more than 90 nations to liberalize their abortion laws.

Another candidate, Geeta Rao Gupta, was president of International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). Rao Gupta delivered ICRW’s highly controversial paper at the 2007 Women Deliver conference that laid the scholarly foundation for the ongoing campaign that claims the Millennium Development Goals cannot be reached without international abortion rights. Rao Gupta is a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, a candidate who is now the UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, successfully campaigned for legalized abortion in her home country of Sri Lanka. As the UN’s Special Rapporteur on violence against women, she addressed Nicaragua’s ban on abortion by saying that “acts deliberately restraining women from having an abortion constitute violence against women by subjecting women to excessive pregnancies and childbearing against their will, resulting in increased and preventable risks of maternal mortality and morbidity.”

UN Women will be funded by the combined budget of the four agencies that are being merged, approximately $220 million, to which all 192 member states contribute. The GEAR Campaign has announced that it is lobbying to increase funding to $1 billion within a few years.

“In a word, we were against a most formidable government machinery that took total control of the message and denied access to the truth to its own people with the help of foreign regimes,” one Kenyan observer told the Friday Fax.

In July, Nairobi’s Catholic bishop told Church faithful to vote NO due to the abortion clause. On August 2nd a full-page ad appeared in the Daily Nation said that, “The Draft Constitution does NOT legalise abortion,” due to a clause stating “life begins at conception.” The ad went on to accuse Church leaders of continuing “to propagate outrageous and inflammatory falsehoods which deliberately misrepresent the proposed new laws.”

In fact, the draft constitution, now approved, contains a clause legalizing abortion, and abortion groups were already preparing for the new laws. Marie Stopes, one of the world’s top abortion providers, began a program in April for texting service information directly to cell phones in Nairobi. In May, a group of medical practitioners released a document entitled, “Standards and Guidelines for Providing Lawful Safe Abortion Services in Kenya.” The week of the vote, electronic and print media published stories about studies claiming that Kenya’s high maternal mortality rate was due to illegal abortion.

In July, a letter from U.S. Members of Congress alerted Kenyans to the fact that the YES campaign was being funded by $23M from the US government.

President Obama had dispatched Vice President Biden to Nairobi to put pressure on President Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, and then appointed US ambassador Michael Ranneberger to lead U.S. efforts. According to AllAfrica.com, the ambassador directed U.S. personnel, even Peace Corps volunteers, to campaign for the document throughout the country and traded on Obama’s heroic reputation with promises of U.S. funding and a visit by Obama, whose paternal grandmother lives in Kenya.

A Kenyan doctor told the Friday Fax, “Government administrators such as permanent Secretaries, Provincial commissioners, District commissioners, District officers, chiefs and parastatal bosses all went to the villages to convince people to vote for the document.”

Another NO campaigner said he, his wife, and a small group spent every weekend for three months traveling Kenya’s long rural roads to tell their fellow Kenyans the truth about the constitution. He said that the rare opponents of the constitution among Members of the Kenyan Parliament came under such intense fire from high-level officials that they eventually changed positions.

An American missionary in Nairobi told the Friday Fax, “[the fact that] the US has been funding the ‘yes’ camp has been an eye opener for Kenyans. Obama is their idol and this has been placing him in a new light, especially in the Church.”

Last week the United Kingdom (UK) announced a new maternal health initiative with an “unprecedented focus on family planning” for the developing world. The plan includes the promotion of abortion and sexual “rights” for children.

The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) chief, Andrew Mitchell, presented the plan called “Choice for Women – Wanted Pregnancies, Safe Births”  at a public consultation forum hosted by DFID and attended by development experts, health professionals, and the general public.

Mitchell said, “The UK Government is to put family planning at the heart of its approach to women’s health in the developing world.” The “DFID will now have an unprecedented focus on family planning, which will be hard-wired into all our country programs.”

The first two of three key proposals detailed in the UK initiative are “Scaling-up access to family planning” and “Addressing unsafe abortion.”  Only the third listed proposal, “Making birth safe,” includes plans for addressing the primary causes of maternal mortality, which are hemorrhaging and sepsis, complications from hypertension and other medical disorders.

The “family planning first” approach to maternal health, which is pushed by the world’s top abortion providers and certain United Nations (UN) staff, has come under fire recently with the publication of groundbreaking new data. The prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, published a study in April that refuted UN “consensus” data which promoted family planning and abortion as ways to decrease maternal mortality. The new study did not mention family planning, instead finding that skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, improved education and economic circumstances, along with declining birth rates, were responsible for a drop in global maternal deaths from more than 500,000 in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008.

Despite the new evidence, the “Choices for Women” plan reflects the outdated UN “family planning first” approach as well as current domestic UK policies. Recent UK laws have proposed universal sex education starting as young as the age of five, and “adolescence” is commonly defined as children between the age of 10 and 14. One UK government-approved sex curriculum encourages pupils to engage in “sexual touching, talking dirty face to face or on the phone, even sexy e-mails and text messages” as a “warm-up” for sexual intercourse.

This week it was announced that more than 1000 pre-teenage girls in the UK have been prescribed hormonal contraceptives.  Under UK confidentiality laws, parents are not entitled to have knowledge of or give consent for these prescriptions.

The discredited “family planning first” approach is also informing the European Union position at the negotiations of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Summit draft document which currently includes ”prioritizing comprehensive voluntary family planning” and “addressing inequities … with particular attention to the large disparities in sexual and reproductive health, by reaching out to underserved populations, including young people, and financing access to services.”  The UN negotiations over the MDG Summit document were suspended last week and are scheduled to resume on August 30th.

A recent gathering of Latin America’s top economic commission issued a document praising secularism, condemning “lesbophobia,” calling for redistributive social systems, and liberally promoting sexual and reproductive rights.

Delegates from more than 30 Latin American and Caribbean countries attended the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) Eleventh Session of the Regional Conference on Women in Brazil. The purpose of the conference was to address gender equality and women’s empowerment in economic terms. The delegates were mainly “gender” advisors, representing the government of member states.

The non-binding outcome document, which its proponents call “The Brasilia Consensus,” recommends that “at the High-level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals, which will be held in September 2010, particular attention should be paid to target 5B concerning universal access to reproductive health.”

The document then goes on to recommend that states review laws that punish or “denounce” women who have undergone abortions. The subject of “denunciation” has become a legal tool used by abortion proponents to argue that abortion laws amount to “cruel and inhuman” treatment of women. One UN delegate told the Friday Fax that his country is already considering reviewing its strict abortion law based upon pressure from UN committees on the subject of “denunciation.”

The ECLAC document also calls on states to incorporate gender “self-identification” in census taking, and derides people who oppose homosexuality. Specifically, it refers to “the prevalence and persistence of violence against women, racism, sexism, impunity and lesbophobia, parity in all areas of decision-making and access to high-quality universal public services in the areas of public awareness, education and health-care, including sexual and reproductive health care.” The document also recommends that states establish national accounts to reimburse women for work done in the home.

In her keynote address at the ECLAC meeting, Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile, insisted that the state cannot be neutral, and called for majority-backed “political will” to enforce the consensus. Only four weeks prior to the ECLAC meeting, Bachelet was appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to join a special advocacy group to rouse support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Specifically, Bachelet was put in charge of overseeing international achievement of MDG 3 on gender equality.

One UN delegate told the Friday Fax that the document is already informing the negotiations on the MDG Review document, now under heated debate at the UN. That document is set to be adopted at a high level UN meeting in September.

The pro-life group, Movimento Defensa de la Vida criticized the “Brasilia Consensus” as drastically out of step with the laws, policies, and culture of the vast majority of ECLAC member states. The Buenos Aires Herald recently reported a survey showing that more 82 percent of Nicaraguans, 73 percent of Brazilians, 71 percent of Mexicans, and 66 percent of Chileans oppose legalizing abortion in almost all its forms.

At a UN committee meeting, three American representatives rose in protest of an Egyptian-led group of nations seeking further investigation of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). One U.S. representative attacked Egypt so aggressively that the Egyptian delegate called a point of order on the matter. The committee is in charge of deciding which organizations are granted consultative status to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Ambassador Rice then announced, “The United States Mission to the UN is, among other efforts, working to reverse an attempt by some members of the NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] Committee of the Economic and Social Council to deny UN consultative status to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.” The U.S. is planning to circumvent Egypt and the committee by bringing the matter to a vote at the upcoming ECOSOC meeting.

Rice used the occasion of the Obama administration’s celebration of “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month” to make the announcement. Rice further asserted that, “In some nations, sexual orientation is considered a crime, and punished with unspeakable violence and humiliation.” However, “sexual orientation” is generally not criminalized, and Rice did not refer to specific cases.  Homosexual sex or “sodomy” is banned in nearly half of all UN member states.

Similarly, Rice asserted that “Public pride is sometimes met with brutal, state-sanctioned beatings and arrests.” While Rice did not back up the claim or define “public pride,” the remark seems to be a reference to “Gay Pride” rallies, which according to IGLHRC include “marches, demonstrations and protests” to promote homosexual rights. The US ambassador to Bulgaria, James Warlick, came under fire in June for promoting a demonstration in Sofia, over the objections of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and pro-family groups.

While campaigning against Egypt at ECOSOC, Rice is seeking to enlist Egyptian support elsewhere at the UN. In April, Rice told reporters that Egypt was essential to U.S. aims during the “complicated and difficult” issue of the Middle East during the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. And last year Rice expressed “deep appreciation to President Mubarak and the Government of Egypt for their persistence in promoting a durable ceasefire in Gaza and southern Israel and in hosting Palestinian reconciliation talks.” The U.S. Congress appropriated $250 million in aid to Egypt in 2010. The aid package gives the Mubarak government veto power on which NGOs receive the U.S. funds.

President Obama’s high profile U.S.-Muslim relations strategy, launched in June 2009 at Cairo University, seeks closer relationships with Muslim societies in order to deal successfully with ongoing U.S. military operations, Middle East peace, and the Iran nuclear crisis, as well as to promote democracy, religious freedom, and women’s rights in the region.

Sexual orientation was not mentioned in the president’s hour-long Cairo speech. It is unclear whether Rice’s speech represented a shift in Obama’s policy.

At the United Nations (UN)-backed Women Deliver conference in Washington DC last week, abortion activists announced the achievement of a new international human right to maternal health just three years after launching a campaign to establish it.  Advocates said that the new right requires nations to liberalize abortion laws and create numerous new bureaucracies, procedures and programs.

In a paper entitled, “Preventing Maternal Mortality and Ensuring Safe Pregnancy,” the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) asserted,  “[W]omen’s rights to life, health, and non-discrimination entitle them” to maternal health and that “governments must ensure women’s access to high-quality, appropriate reproductive health care, abolish discriminatory laws and social practices … and allow women to make autonomous decisions regarding their reproductive lives.” The paper said this includes “contraceptives, family planning counseling, sex education, and safe abortion services.” CRR and other groups have dozens of legal cases pending in Brazil, India, South Africa and elsewhere to enact the new right.

Paul Hunt, former UN Special Rapporteur for health, said that human rights are not just about judicial accountability, but also discriminatory budgets and policies that require “radical” social transformation to rectify. Harvard University fellow Alicia Yamin, a founder of the campaign to establish the right, said, “Human rights needs to be an insurrectionalist discourse,” that “subverts the pathologies of power.”

“Women and children are not dying because it is a medical problem,” Yamin said, but because “It is a social problem. It is because they are discriminated against.” Columbia University professor Lynne Freedman said “Human rights work begins by identifying the workings of power [and] working for rearrangements of power necessary for change using a different vision of human well-being.”

Yamin said activists could use “hard and soft law” such as an article in the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that specifies using “the maximum extent of resources” to protect rights. University of Toronto law professor Rebecca Cook said activists could show how laws and policies “attack women’s moral capacity” by using the definition of discrimination in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

CEDAW proscribes laws and policies with the “‘effect or purpose’ of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women … of human rights and fundamental freedoms….” One legal expert told the Friday Fax that the U.S. Supreme Court has historically rejected this definition as too broad since it includes the effect, and not just the intent, of laws and policies. The United States is not party to ICESCR.

The basis for the announcement of a new right, according to experts like Yamin is a non-binding 2009 Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution stating, “preventable maternal mortality is a health, development and human rights challenge.” The non-binding resolution was promoted by the European Union and came after two years of intense lobbying on the part of abortion advocates.

Conservative legal experts have been dubious about claims to new rights in the past, arguing that it requires explicit negotiation in a binding treaty document, or a general and consistent customary practice of states out of a sense of legal obligation that develops over an extensive period of time.

The medical journal The Lancet published a study in April refuting UN research claiming 500,000+ annual maternal deaths has remained unchanged for decades. The new study put the figure at 342,900 with 60,000 of those from HIV/AIDS, and said the number has been declining since 1980.

World Health Organization (WHO) executive director Margaret Chan told journalist Christiane Amanpour that legal abortion was a key factor in reducing maternal deaths, but the Lancet study she referred to never mentioned abortion. Thoraya Obaid, director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said the UN’s own report on maternal health would be published in September and show similar trends. But WHO’s top statistician Ties Boerma said the UN report would likely not be published until 2011, and when pressed stated cryptically that one could expect it to have similar findings if it were to use the same data.

Such collaboration seemed unlikely due to a sharp disagreement between UN staff who want only one set of UN-centered “consensus” statistics, and other scientists, such as the new study’s author Christopher Murray and Lancet‘s editor Richard Horton, who called for more scholarly independence.

Scientists flatly refused to back up the 20 year-old claim by UN agencies and activists that family planning improves maternal health. The Guttmacher Institute’s president, Sharon Camp, asked Murray whether his study’s finding linking declining global fertility rates to better maternal health supports the idea that more family planning will reduce maternal deaths. Murray replied that “there is no scientific way to prove that.”

Scientists also undercut UN staff’s use of the world’s slow progress toward MDG 5 as a basis for urgent pleas for family planning funds. Boerma and Murray both said that its aim of reducing maternal deaths 75% by 2015 was unrealistic since it was not based upon “historical trends.” The world would need an 8% annual drop, whereas 4% has been the best so far.

Downplaying the remarks, Guttmacher’s Camp defended a joint Guttmacher-UNFPA report which was based on the now discredited UN figures, and which calls for a doubling of family planning funds in order to reduce maternal deaths by 70%.  Camp did not explain why the same amount of funding would be required for a smaller overall reduction.

Hans Rosling, professor at the prestigious Karolinska Institute, said that the world’s dramatic drop in fertility cannot be tied to policy interventions, citing instead improved personal income. He cited Sri Lanka, whose sharp decline in maternal deaths was the basis for setting the MDG 5 goal to reduce maternal deaths 75% by 2015. He asserted that the island nation benefited from asphalt roads and other infrastructure put in place under its period of colonialism. Not mentioned was the fact that abortion is highly restricted there.

Basing his findings on data reaching back to 1800, Rosling jibed the UN’s 20 year-old maternal health statistics, saying maternal health research predates the UN.

The disarray of UN leadership on the maternal health data comes in the same week that UN member states begin negotiating the outcome document for this September’s high-level meeting on maternal health.

In “Reproductive Rights at the Start of the 21st Century: Global Progress, Yet Backpedaling on Gains in U.S.,” the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) argues that “funding for abortion services has increasingly been recognized as a necessary tool for ensuring access to a fundamental human right.”

To back this claim, CRR refers to 21 European countries, Colombia, and South Africa, which partially fund abortion, as well as Nepal and Mexico City, which “provide funding for poor women as an element of the abortion right itself.”

In contrast, CRR says, the “recent debate over insurance coverage for abortions makes it painfully obvious that the United States has failed to keep up with international norms on abortion rights and must re-examine its funding policies if it is to continue its leadership on women’s rights and autonomy.”  CRR calls President Obama’s executive order against tax payer-funded abortions “misguided.”

To support its assertions, the retrospective offers two national court decisions, one in 2005 by Ethiopia and another in 2006 by the Colombia constitutional court. The rest of CRR’s claim is based upon non-binding statements by U.N. committees, such as a 2005 finding by the Human Rights Committee that Peru violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights because a woman suffered “deep depression” after bearing a child with anencephaly.

The document also claims that “family planning is increasingly being understood in terms of equality and non-discrimination,” and not just health care. To support this, CRR cites non-binding comments by the Human Rights Committee from 2000 and by the committee that oversees the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) from 2008.

The retrospective also asserts that nations violate international law when they have high maternal mortality rates. To support this, the document cites a 2009 non-binding resolution by the Human Rights Council and mentions comments by UN treaty monitoring bodies.

Piero Tozzi, J.D., C-FAM senior fellow, told the Friday Fax that the global trend is actually going in the opposite direction from what CRR asserts: “In the past decade, Poland, El Salvador and Nicaragua tightened their restrictions on abortion. In the past year or so, the constitutions of the Dominican Republic and a majority of Mexican States were amended to explicitly protect life from conception, as was the penal law of East Timor. We have also seen constitutional courts of Chile and Peru determine that the so-called ‘morning after pill’ violates those countries’ constitutional protections of unborn life, due to its potential abortifacient effects, and a similar determination made by the Honduran legislature.”