There is no Maternal health without Reproductive health.

It's times like these when I am truly, cringingly, embarrassed by our government.

It's no secret that I'm a pinko commie liberal. I believe in safety nets and socialized health care and helping those who are down on their luck. I believe in women's shelters and drug rehabs and needle exchange programs. I even listen religiously to the CBC. So it's not hard to find something for me to be angry about in most of our Conservative government's policies. However, this one goes beyond the pale, and not just for me. In their recently announced G8 initiative to promote maternal health in the developing world, the Tories have decided that birth control is not part of maternal health.

From the Toronto Star:

"In the Commons on Wednesday, International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda pointedly left birth control off the list of aid projects the government intended to support, saying that “saving lives” was more important than family planning."

The absurdity of this statement is obvious to everyone, it seems, except the Conservatives. Half a million women in the developing world will die this year in pregnancy and childbirth. One in 16 women in Africa die from 'maternal causes' every year, compared to 1 in 2500 in the United States. If we're protecting the health of mothers, helping them time their pregnancies effectively is the number one way to do that. To say that an initiative to save mothers' lives doesn't include birth control is like saying that an initiative to prevent cancer doesn't include smoking cessation.

I have always suspected that this initiative wasn't created out of a true desire to do good in the world. Rather, like everything with Stephen Harper's government, it was done with an agenda in mind: to appeal to women voters, who are traditionally more left-leaning and socially liberal. But by excluding birth control from the initiative, it's become painfully obvious that it truly was just another ploy, one that cannot go outside party doctrine.

Within the Conservative party of Canada, there exists an extreme right-wing base (read: those who wish they could just rule as the Reform Party of Canada) who keep Stephen Harper in charge. They can just as easily remove him, and he knows it. And it's these people who believe birth control is a political issue rather than a health one.

It's a difficult stance to justify: to say that an individual - and in particular, a woman - can protect her health without protecting her sexual health. Not only does it leave open a wide range of medical issues that could kill women (HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; unsafe abortions; pregnancy and childbirth itself); it also marginalizes these very issues. Reproductive care is the number one, most significant factor affecting the overall health and socioeconomic well being of women of childbearing age everywhere.  Educating women over sexual health and allowing them to have control over their own bodies' ability to reproduce would prevent 25% of maternal and child deaths in the developing world. And that's just one statistic. There are thousands more.

The justification for this marginalization, presumably, is that birth control means that women will be able to engage in sex for purposes other than procreation. The necessary next conclusion being that sex for any reason other than procreation is immoral should not be encouraged. Or in other words, giving women - mothers - control over their reproductive health will make them, presumably, morally reprehensible sluts. That anyone who engages in sex without the absolute desire to procreate should be aware that they are taking their lives into their own hands.

No, we should just listen to Bev Oda, who says "saving lives [is] more important than family planning."

And she, perhaps, is the only one that doesn't realize that in the developing world, "family planning" is probably the number one thing that could be done to save those lives.

Shannon blogs at ThreeSeven.ca and saves the world at ecochick.ca.

This is an original Canada Moms Blog post.