Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

'The issue remains confusing'

by Aaron Wherry on Friday, September 3, 2010 2:51pm - 0 Comments

The Citizen’s Elizabeth Payne follows up on her now vaguely contested column about Bev Oda and Canadian funding for abortion overseas.

During an interview, she talked freely about the importance of family planning in maternal health — a theme she touched on in the blogs she wrote while away. She emphasized that the government supports International Planned Parenthood, with which it is in active talks about extending funding. We even discussed abortion. The tone of the conversation struck me as notably different from what I had heard from other government officials throughout last spring’s debate on maternal health.

By Thursday afternoon, there were opposition calls for clarification of the government’s policy on family planning and abortion. A Catholic group even called for the minister’s resignation. And the minister called me back, hoping to clarify some of what she had said. Oda made it clear that none of the $1.1 billion earmarked for maternal health would go to fund abortion, although it would be used to support family planning initiatives. However, she conceded, Canada would, if asked, provide general health funding, outside of the G8 initiative, to governments who provide abortion services. Canada, in other words, may indirectly fund abortion services — by training doctors who sometimes perform abortions or improving maternity wards where abortions are legally provided, for example.

Tags: abortion, Africa, Bev Oda, CIDA, foreign aid, maternal health, Planned Parenthood

More by Aaron Wherry

Crit_Reasoning

But when it comes to the kind of general health support that improves the lives of mothers and children — outside of the special projects funded by the G8 initiative — it cannot follow every dollar to be sure it is not supporting abortion nor would it stipulate how that money should be spent. Which is how it should be. Oda, in fact, underlined the fact that countries like working with Canada because we are so flexible.

There is a certain unescapable logic to Oda's position as reported by Elizabeth Payne. If Canada provides funding through CIDA to train doctors in the third world, it is possible that those doctors will sometimes perform abortions. If Canada helps build maternity wards in countries where abortion is legal, it's certainly possible that abortions may be performed there as well.

Jan

This is why the Conservatives claiming that they could somehow separate out funding in such a way that it would never go to family planning and/or abortion was so ridiculous in the first place.

Emily

An attempted fudge that will likely get her removed from cabinet.
bergkamp

Money is fungible. If Canada is giving money to planned parenthood than we are funding abortions.

Jan

The government cut off funding to PP – but are in discussion with them now. Can you see there is some serious confusion on the issue.

Blacktop

Who cares besides the RC Church (not a big constinuencey anymore)? . The fundamentalist right. That's who he's playing to and likely to lose other votes thereby.

Geardoid

The large cohort called the 'centrist' populace does not support having their tax dollars spent to procure abortions either at home or as some sort of benefice to export. The centrist position does not endorse the left's view that abortion is a good on a par with a root canal. The destruction of a nascent human being, as Beverley McLaughlin (no anti-abortionist) had long ago put it — is understood as the reason we have an ageing population which increasingly is unable to sustain its own socialized medical system.

Red Maple

Yours is not a centrist position. It definitely falls on the right side of the political fence. Centrist views on abortion are nuanced, and I find no nuance in what you have written, only absolute declarations.

Style

Do you think the Liberals would be willing to swap Paul Szabo for Bev Oda? It would be fun to see the Liberals alienate the Christian right that way.

Emily

The 'christian right' is permanently alienated from the Libs, [not to mention the rest of the country] so it wouldn't make any difference to their vote.

Style

Why would you claim the rest of the country is not permanently alienated from the Libs? And how does the Liberal party end up with social conservative MPs if social conservatives are alienated from the Liberal party?

Emily

Check the polls.

Libs get the occasional socon…regrettable, but such is politics.

Style

Why is it acceptable for the Liberals to appeal to social conservatives? Do you think it just happens by chance or are you simply not bothered by the Liberal platform and performance being acceptable to the social conservatives? Either way, why are you concerned about social conservative support for the Conservative party but not for the Liberal party?
Emily

They don't 'appeal' to them. If you are looking to get elected, and Libs are popular in your area, you join the Libs. It's just politics.

Socons in the Con party are the majority…lot of people there from the old SoCreds and the CHP who know they'll never be voted in otherwise. They're hanging on the coat tails of the Con party to do their own thing.
Style

What is the difference between social conservatives using the Liberal party to get elected and social conservatives using the Conservative party to get elected?
Holly Stick

There are not enough of them to take over the Liberal Party. They are running the Conservative Party now, and are imposing their narrow-minded views on Canadians who do not agree with them.
Style

I wish people who claim to care about this, including Paul Wells, would spend more time looking at the actual composition of the Liberal caucus and electorate and the resulting gaps and silences in policy and inactivity in policy over abortion funding and access. This unsubstantiated assumption that the Liberals can handle their social conservatives, while other parties are over-run by them is pretty annoying.
http://www.bcptl.org Ted Hewlett

Somehow the assumption in this chain of comments is that there is something disreputable about social conservatives, but the posters don't say what it is. Is it support of traditional marriage, support for families, or support for human life that they object to? –Nothing like trying to discredit those one opposes by implying that the views of others are beyond the pale without bothering to counter those views!
Style

Yes, I guess I was pretty coy in that last comment, only mentioning abortion funding and access all the way at the end of the first sentence. And all of this under a post about abortion funding, where the first tag Paul gave it is "abortion". How could you hope to know we were discussing the social conservatives' love of temperate climes?

tobyornotoby

"We're doing the very best we can to sound like we're funding progressive development without sounding like we're scared sh**less to do anything," the Minister said.

Meanwhile representatives of the Catholic church criticized the minister for coming close to using reason and modern reality rather than ancient, poorly interpreted theology to make a policy decision.

Geardoid

The notion that human life is inviolable is as far from "ancient, poorly interpreted theology" as its apotheosis – that abortion is a good on par with a root canal – is close to an absurd novel interpretation of natural philosophy.

Geardoid

Apparently a considerable number of the defenders of Planned Parenthood and of CIDA's record in giving conditional aid to developing countries think that somewhere along the line abortion got transmuted from a harrowing admission of failure to regard the dignity of human beings to the apotheosis of a liberation theology. Completely ignoring that over two-thirds of the polled centrist cohort in Canada rejects abortion funding, these advocates try to maintain that abortion has become a social good and even a right. They might be forgiven some confusion at the sight of an abortionist pinned with the Order of Canada, but the fact remains — established by one of their own, a feminist supreme court justice — that there can be no right to abortion. As for instance the high court in a reunited Germany realized, a state has to have an interest in the lives of undifferentiated citizens yet unborn. Suspending that vital interest in any selected progeny is, not unlike Germany of a near century past, heinous and ruinous. That is why the Geneva convention on genocide retains a clause condemning the coercive limitation of a people's number – a clause which has been notoriously set aside in CIDA's past endorsement of exported abortion and abortion 'expertise' as a condition of aid (such as a CIDA advisor's briefing to the Canadian delegation to the Cairo UNFPA conference in 1994). Until recently, CIDA and Foreign Affairs principals thought that the prohibition extends to 'extreme' coercions; but against this rising watermark even China's policy was not seen as coercive enough to offend. This is where the current absurdity (of treating abortion as a 'good') really began. It may be hoped that Bev Oda will see the error of her ministry's legacy.
peter

Not that any of the lazy and smug, self-satisfied in their moral virtue, will bother…but try some google searches on the role of the Catholic Church and assorted Christian charities in delivering front line primary health care in Africa….should be easy.

More difficult, but doable, investigate the actions of the PRC (you know that growing totalitarian superpower) and their activities in Africa.

Next investigate the actions of EU, former-colonial powers, and their funding and trade agreements in the AU.

You may be surprised to discover that Canada is actually doing a fairly credible job in a hopelessly tangled maze.