Sex Ed in Form 1?

On August 10 the Times told us that "The Family Life Association of Swaziland has made sure girls from St. Anne's High School know where to get their reproductive health services and HIV/AIDS information". Later we were told the students were educated on "teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and HIV prevention". We also learned that these students were in Forms 1 and 2.

Girls just beginning their secondary school experience should not need reproductive health services. Form 1 and 2 students need a society that gives them the clear and consistent message to save sex for marriage and keep sex in marriage only. That simple behaviour would end almost all new HIV infections (over 90% of new HIV cases are contracted through heterosexual encounters), eliminate unwed pregnancies, and put young men and women on the road to strong character and lifelong marital happiness. If mothers and fathers, other adults, schools, and the media frequently and consistently encouraged young people to save sex for marriage and keep it in marriage only, and if these adults provided a good example of that behaviour, this would build strong individuals, strong marriages, strong families, and a strong nation.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com

Maternal Health and Abortion

People of good will desire mothers to have safe pregnancies and deliveries; no decent person wishes for a woman's pregnancy to cause her death. Unfortunately, abortion proponents regularly use the desire for safe pregnancies to advance legalizing abortion. They do this by stating that huge numbers of women die from illegal abortions or "complications of pregnancy and childbirth", then assert that legalized abortion would save these womens' lives.

The statistics of mothers dying of illegal abortions, however, are grossly exaggerated by pro-abortion organizations. A few examples:
*A 1989 CNN documentary said 6 million abortions take place in Brazil each year, and 400,000 women die from them. But the United Nations Demographic Yearbook for 1988 showed that 40,000 women between the ages of 15-44 died of all causes in that year.

*In Italy in 1983, abortion proponents claimed 20,000 women died of illegal abortions per year. The number of women aged 15-45 dying from all causes was in fact 11,500.

*At the United Nations' Habitat conference in Turkey in 1996, UNICEF claimed that 585,000 women died of pregnancy and childbirth-related causes each year. The United Nations Demographic Year Book for 1990 listed maternal deaths worldwide at about 6,000 per year.

Complicating this issue is the fact that in much of the developing world, the cause of people's death and even the sex of the deceased is not recorded. The United Nations Population Division issued a report "The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics" that said "more than a third of the 204 countries or areas examined did not report deaths by cause, sex and age even once." The report also said that “even where the deaths are derived from a civil registration with complete coverage, maternal deaths may be missed or not correctly identified, thus compromising the reliability of such statistics.”

We have cause do doubt, then, when the UNFPA tells us (as they did in the Times on 7 July) that 1,000 women die daily of "complications of pregnancy and childbirth" and that protecting "reproductive health and rights is fundamental to our collective future and sustainable development." 1,000 women a day is 365,000 women a year; that number falls into the same very high and hard-to-verify category described above. Remember also that in United Nations language, "reproductive health and rights" almost always includes abortion.

2007's "Women Deliver" conference in London claimed that 500,000 women a year die of pregnancy-related causes. A delegate to that conference said "With all this evidence that the number of maternal deaths and deaths from abortion is impossible to know, it is egregious that WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF and others build policy prescriptions – especially the highly controversial promotion of abortion rights – on virtually no data. Attention should be placed upon building good health care systems that not only provide decent care but provide registries of births and deaths so that sound policy to address maternal mortality can be made.”

Let us take this delegate's recommendation seriously. Let us love and care for both mother and child. No to abortion; yes to life.

Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com