Pro-Woman - Or Pro-Death Indoctrination?
Life Site News has an excellent – but very disturbing – series of articles on the ironically named “Women Deliver” conference held this past week in Washington D.C. The conference, supposedly intended to promote maternal health and reduce maternal mortality throughout the world, turned out to actually be all about pushing the abortion agenda. The fact that women deliver babies and that they have babies in the womb was virtually ignored, in spite of pro-lifers’ attempts to call attention to this fact.
Among the conference attendees were many of the world’s ministers and parliamentarians, including: Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund; Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services; Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization; Gill Greer, Director-General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who gave the keynote address.
Conference sponsors included several UN agencies, government departments from the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the U.S. (USAID), and Canada, as well as fortune-1000 companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, and Merck & Co.
The speakers at the conference put forward strategies for how to get past laws banning abortion in countries where it is illegal, how to legalize abortion where it is illegal, and of course, to expand contraception everywhere. The claimed that the best way to reduce maternal mortality rates throughout the world was to promote abortion. They also constantly trashed religion and “fetus fundamentalism.”
Pro-life leaders who attended the conference, however, point to a Lancet study published in April that showed, contrary to what the UN and the international pro-abortion lobby have long claimed, that maternal mortality around the world has dropped drastically in recent years. In addition, the study nowhere mentioned legal abortion as a significant causal factor in the reduced death rate.
“This is a classic case of their ideologies trumping the science,” said conference attendee Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women of America. Even when the science contradicts their goal, they don’t change their ideology.”
The science of fetal development was also completely unwelcome at the conference.
Volunteers from the National Right to Life Committee were handing out pink “Celebrate Motherhood bags outside the conference. They contained a small plastic fetal model of a 12-week-old unborn child, a small replication of an unborn child’s feet at 10 weeks gestation, a brochure on prenatal development, and a brochure containing information on proven means of reducing maternal mortality rates worldwide (the supposed focus of the conference).
Many attendees took them – only to have them confiscated by conference staff once they got to the door of the convention center, by staffers who told them they were “anti-life” and “anti-woman.”
Life Site News details what happened:
One attendee who received a bag told LifeSiteNews.com that she was interrogated in an intimidating manner by an organizer who said that “you need to throw away” any pink bag handed out by the “anti-woman” demonstrators, because “they’re trying to ruin our conference.”
However, one pro-life volunteer said that the aggressive approach taken by conference staff may have been for the better: when attendees, including UN delegates, asked about the confiscated material in clear plastic bags, they were told by pro-lifers that the materials could not be handed out because “they don’t want you to have this information.”
“It was great for what we’re getting across,” said the volunteer.
The pro-lifers were later able to collect the confiscated bags.
Jeanne Head, NRLC Vice President for International Affairs and UN Representative for National Right to Life, and a registered nurse, said she was frustrated at how the conference hijacked the issue of maternal mortality to push an agenda harmful to women.
“We’ve known how to save lives in the developing world for over 70 years, and women are still dying in the developing world,” Head told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN). “It’s aggravating to me that they’re spending all this money and all this talk about how to save women’s lives and it’s very simple.”
“Good health care, prenatal care, emergency obststetric care, antibiotics, clean blood, clean water, good nutrition. And they’re talking about all this garbage instead of doing the job.”Concerned Women for America president Wendy Wright, who was present at the conference, said the treatment of the pro-life materials illustrated the conference’s hypocritical message.
“Here they are the whole conference saying: information, give women information and they’ll have power,” Wright told LSN, “and then they take that information away so that they’ll be powerless to argue against the indoctrination they’re getting.”
Wright further noted that the conference revealed how the pro-abortion movement’s “zeitgeist” is “all about power.” “They think that we’re driven by the same things that they’re driven by. They’re driven by rage and power. It’s just the opposite for us - we’re driven by love to serve others,” she said.
Be sure to read the whole five-part series here
Additional information was provided by this story by NRLC itself.
