No Maternal Health without 'Reproductive' Health
The following is an excerpt from a March 31 story from the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Hillary Clinton has taken issue with Canada's signature G8 initiative on maternal mortality, arguing that any effort to improve the health of mothers in poor countries must include access to abortion.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is seeking to make maternal health the centrepiece of the G8 summit he is hosting in Ontario in June, was initially reluctant to include contraception as part of the agenda, and he has insisted the plan would leave out abortion.
But the U.S. Secretary of State was blunt in her disagreement with this approach yesterday.
"You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health," Ms. Clinton said at a news conference after a meeting of G8 foreign ministers in Gatineau, Que. "And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.
It was the third time in a two-day visit to Canada that Ms. Clinton gave her Canadian hosts a headache.
Her willingness to ruffle feathers here - on Monday, she criticized Canada's convening of a meeting on the Arctic and publicly asked for Ottawa to keep troops in Afghanistan past a 2011 deadline - is hinting at underlying tensions between Washington and Ottawa that have surprised some diplomatic observers.
"It's curious and curiouser," said Colin Robertson, a former senior diplomat at Canada's embassy in Washington, now a senior fellow with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute.
