​Theresa May announced the new reproductive health programme during a visit to Kenya.
More ideological colonialism.
Continuing the UK Government's policy of spending vast sums of aid money on pushing contraception and abortion on developing nations, Theresa May, the Prime Minister, has announced a new initiative which will see £200 million spent on family planning in Africa and Asia.
The Prime Minister announced the creation of the Women’s Integrated Sexual Health (WISH) programme during a visit to Kenya. It will "target women and girls in rural and poor communities who have traditionally been hardest to reach, will provide mobile clinics and contraceptive materials such as pills, condoms and implants."
More money for Marie Stopes
Abortion giant Marie Stopes (MSI), who recently boasted that it "provided or supported more than 4.1 million safe abortion and post-abortion care services in 2017, a 12% increase on the previous year", is one of the organisations benefiting from the funding. It "estimates that it will help avert 2.6 million unintended pregnancies and 1.7 million unsafe abortions."
Britain is already the second biggest funder of family planning programmes in the world - in the last five years it has given MSI alone £163.01 million. The organisation's recent financial report revealed that the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) was the single biggest donor, granting £44 million, contributing to it posting a record income of £296.1 million. This is despite a ComRes poll showing that 65% of the public oppose UK taxpayer money being spent on abortions overseas.
Strings attached
Obianuju Ekeocha of Culture of Life Africa has repeatedly slammed Western countries funding abortion and contraception as a means of alleviating poverty as a form of "ideological colonisation". She has also worked to impose MSI's record of performing illegal abortions in a number of African countries. Her documentary, Killing Africa, uncovered evidence of shocking practices, including illegal abortions, by MSI in Uganda, and her upcoming film, Strings Attached, promises to expose how the money pledged by Western nations on "sexual and reproductive health and rights" is really spent.
At what cost the abortion agenda?
Serious concerns have also been raised that DFID pushes the abortion agenda at the expense of women's lives. As Fiorella Nash explores in detail in her new book, The Abolition of Woman, the push to end "unsafe abortion" (which is given no clear definition) means resources are diverted from interventions which are known to reduce maternal mortality. For example, in a DFID report on maternal health, the deadliest complication (haemorrhage) is mentioned twice, post-partum infection is mentioned twice, while abortion crops up 71 times.
As Donna Harrison, M.D, president, American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a letter to the Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights, "abortion, spontaneous and induced, accounts for less than 5 percent of maternal mortality. It is scientifically, medically, and morally unacceptable to divert resources from interventions proven to reduce maternal mortality to the provision of abortion, under the guise of 'decreasing unsafe abortion.' The better way to reduce the human rights dimension of maternal mortality is to provide resources targeting the causes of 90 percent of maternal mortality."
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