Marge Berer
Editor, Reproductive Health Matters
13 July 2012
From a communications point of view, the FP Summit was a raving success. Newspapers, TV and radio all over the world covered it. Around the globe everyone reached by the media heard how wonderful family planning is and how neglected it has been, the Lancet launched a special edition , Guttmacher and others released facts and figures showing the extent of unmet need. Across the women’s health movement the listserves, Facebook and Twitter were full of it. All in all, the day – and many of the messages it gave birth to – had enthusiastic, even missionary, overtones.
On the absolutely fabulous side, Melinda Gates’ challenge to the Pope to acknowledge that contraception is ‘not controversial’ even amongst Catholic women, is likely to rock the foundations of the Vatican’s whole policy on abstinence, condoms and contraception from the grassroots of the Catholic church up. It was God’s gift to Catholics for Choice, who will be promoting Condoms-for-Life and safer sex at the upcoming AIDS conference later this month.
Also on the plus side, there were representatives of governments and many, many others who are making progressive change happen in their countries, and who spoke out about it. These are people who can make a big difference when they get home who did support comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights from the podium and the floor of the meeting, and who insisted that family planning services can only be provided within that wider remit. There were people who needed to learn what it was all about, some of whom were too young to have lived the history, but who came with strong pro-choice views.
The media exposure of the value of family planning has a huge potential for good, because it will have reached people who didn’t know family planning existed or whether it’s good for them and safe, and others who have never had a chance to talk about these matters with others. It will also have put fertility control as a public good on the map around the world. And hopefully it will spur those with expertise in sexuality and reproduction to start talking about what they know, and what is and is not true amongst all the hoopla – and to assert that the power of money must not be allowed to take precedence over public health values and human rights principles, or the values of knowledge and truth.
On the oh-God-help-us-no-no-no side, though, Melinda Gates anointed herself as the new saviour of women’s and children’s health, and the press ate it up in both pictures and words. Some of the best people in the field of sexual and reproductive health, were unexpectedly uncritical, singing the praises of this wonderful opportunity. Perhaps not surprising given the historical shortfall in funding for family planning.
A golden moment, the kind that big money and a Tory government are at home in, stage-managed by a slick public relations company called McKinsey (who describe themselves as “the trusted advisor and counsellor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions”). With big pharma, having abandoned contraceptives for many years, talking about the opportunity (“70% of this market is under-served”) to make a profit from family planning needs and then give some of it back to women – as a charitable gift. Patting each other on the back for being so wonderful as to finally have recognised that women have health needs they can exploit. A truly Hollywood event, except this is not entertainment. This is women’s lives.
This golden moment, which had to happen mainly because so many governments have failed to take responsibility for the public health needs of their citizens, for maternal health, family planning, abortion, sexual health, in the only equitable manner that works – by providing publicly funded, well-resourced services.
It was a day that showed the world it was possible for one very well-meaning woman, backed by the power and money of her husband, to direct global policy and claim ownership of the provision of family planning to 120 million women and at the same time, to disparage and stigmatise women’s need for abortion to the entire world – and get away with it without being challenged. She had the courage to challenge the Pope. It is a shame that a summit attended by many of the world’s experts on these subjects could not emulate her bravery and challenge her in return.
She was not the only one who got away with it. The Summit also gave the podium to and applauded politicians from countries where millions of women have the very unmet need for contraception in whose name this Summit was called: women who are still dying from unsafe abortions because their governments are too cowardly to make abortion legal and safe; and women who are dying from complications of pregnancies because they have no access to life-saving maternity care. Countries that since the 1960s have received hundreds of millions if not billions of US dollars for family planning, which have as good as disappeared, or been squandered and misspent.
It included representatives of the very same private sectors whose services and prices for contraceptive methods and safe abortions remain inaccessible to and unaffordable for many in the world’s population who need them, especially young women and men. And not only in low- and middle-income countries, but also in the United States, a country whose health industry has made life hell for Barack Obama for trying to make health care even a little bit more affordable, excluding abortion of course, for millions of disenfranchised people. The United States – a country that has the biggest and most violent and aggressive anti-abortion movement on earth, second only to the Vatican, and some of the highest unintended pregnancy rates in the developed world, especially among poor women.
It was addressed by the Prime Minister of the UK, the Right Honourable David Cameron, who got a standing ovation for a speech about the importance of empowering women, a speech that stank of hypocrisy. A Prime Minister who is responsible for indefensible, swingeing spending cuts that are adversely affecting women, young people and children above all, including cuts in family planning, sexual health services and welfare, at a time when it has never before cost so much to raise a family. Whose Secretary of State for Health is selling off our National Health Service piece by piece, who has wasted public time and at least £1 million in public money harassing some of the real heroes of women’s rights, that is, abortion service providers, for no credible reason. Whose Minister for Public Health put an anti-abortion group on the government’s sexual health advisory group “for the sake of balance” and to propitiate anti-abortion fanatics in Parliament – a Minister who described abortion as a “sensitive” issue, after 45 years of safe, legal abortions (except for women in Northern Ireland, of course).
And now it’s the morning after. How to go on from here and engage in what will happen? It’s a pity about Melinda Gates’ prejudices against abortion. I hope she will reconsider them because it would make her a far more credible ambassador for this cause which, after all, does not belong to her.