Our Research: Maternal Mortality

By Austin Ruse | June 7, 2011

C-FAM Submission to OHCHR Thematic Study on Maternal Mortality and Morbidity and Human Rights

Donna Harrison, Ph.D.

A paper submitted to the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) by C-FAM and authored by Donna Harrison, M.D., President of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). The paper calls on the Human Rights Council “to defend the right to bodily integrity of all human beings from fertilization to natural death” and “refrain [from] supporting in law and policy measures…empirically proven to hurt rather than help pregnant women. 

Removing the Roadblocks from Achieving MDG 5 by Improving the Data on Maternal Mortality

Donna Harrison, Ph.D.

By establishing Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5), world leaders agreed that reducing maternal mortality was essential to fulfilling their “collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level.”1 The goal aims at improving maternal health by reducing by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio between 1990 and 2015. Now at the halfway point, the world lags far behind in achieving the goal, with questionable prospects for success. This C-FAM briefing paper demonstrates one important reason why.

 

Six Problems with “Women Deliver:” Why the UN Should Not Change MDG 5

Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

UN agencies and members of the UN Secretariat partnered in a conference promoting, among other things, abortion rights as the only way to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5, improving maternal health. The conference, called “Women Deliver,” was held in London from 18 – 20 October 2007. The radically new approach is gravely flawed for many reasons. This C-FAM briefing paper addresses the six primary problems with the controversial approach promoted at the conference, herein termed the “abortion first” approach.

United Nations Children Fund: Women or Children First

Douglas A. Sylva, Ph.D.

This C-FAM white paper demonstrates how UNICEF has abandoned its initial focus on helping children and re-focused on advocating for sexual and reproductive rights. UNICEF is involved in many programs aimed at reducing maternal mortality through promotion of “family planning,” including contraception and abortion.

 
Rights by Stealth: The Role of UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Campaign for an International Right to Abortion

Douglas A. Sylva, Ph.D., Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

In the mid-1990s, a group of UN officials and non-governmental organizations gathered to formulate a strategy to promote a controversial international social policy agenda by reinterpreting existing human rights treaties to give them new meanings. At the heart of this strategy was a four step process to use the six UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies and an interlocking network of UN agencies, UN officials, and NGOs to create an international right to abortion. In the decade that followed, UN member nations have allowed the strategy to develop to an extensive degree, despite the fact that it undermines their own laws. This C-FAM white paper examines the reasons why the process has been able to advance, and analyzes the way the strategy has undermined the treaty monitoring system and challenged the credibility of the international human rights regime.

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