Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke last week at the United Nations, dedicating part of his speech to child and maternal health. He is to be congratulated for the work he has undertaken to hold countries accountable for funding national systems that will improve women’s health in their role as mothers. This commitment, taken at the Muskoka G8 Summit in 2010, has helped to significantly reduce maternal deaths.
This is no small feat and Canada can be justly proud.
In 2000, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan sought and received the support of political leaders around the globe to end extreme poverty by 2015. The eight Millennium Development Goals that were the core of this commitment have achieved a great deal. But we all know that some of the MDGs will not be achieved by next year.
In particular, the fifth MDG, which committed countries to reduce by three-quarters the number of women who die each year from preventable causes of pregnancy and birth, and to ensure women have universal access to reproductive health, is among those.
That is why many global groups and coalitions, across the spectrum of maternal health and women’s rights, have asked all national leaders at the UN to include women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health care on the post-2015 development goals agenda.
In his speech, the prime minister promised to make maternal, newborn and child health a priority of his government in the coming year, and announced significant financial support for the Every Woman/Every Child project launched by the UN secretary general in 2010. The effort focuses on strengthening policy and financing improved services (including some health services) to women and children in under-resourced countries.
More and more, though, it is women themselves who are making the difference on the ground and holding their own governments to account. Take Rose Mlay, for instance, a Tanzanian midwife who personally organized 4,000 organizations and individuals to lobby their government for women’s health and reproductive services. The result? For the first time ever in Tanzania, funds were set aside for C-sections and blood banks to save the lives of women in high-risk pregnancies.
Rose was there last week at the UN to speak of this success story. Her story has a purpose and a meaning beyond the positive outcome of more care for women in high-risk pregnancies in Tanzania. The efforts of the Roses of the world remind us that at the core of the current discussion of funding services for pregnant women in under-resourced countries is their lack of legal rights and political and economic power. Addressing this discrimination must go hand-in-hand with funding support for health services to pregnant women.
Harper has shown himself willing and able to provide leadership for the global efforts to address the complex issues of maternal, newborn and child health.
He now has the golden opportunity to take the lead in the global effort to promote women’s health and reproductive rights as a key part of that effort.
Saving women’s lives in this way is a goal worthy of the prime minister’s legacy.
Maureen McTeer is a lawyer and the Canadian representative of the international White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood.
