1 Amendments of Nirj DEVA related to 2007/2274(INI)
Amendment 1 #
Draft opinion
Paragraph 4
Paragraph 4
4. Recalls the Millennium Development Goals, and stresses that access to education and health are basic human rights; believes that health programmes, including sexual and reproductive health, promotion of gender equality, empowerment of women and rights of the child should be prominent in the EU´s development and human rights policy,the following should therefore be prominent in the EU’s development and human rights policy: - health programmes, including sexual and reproductive health - Notes that the most important means for reducing maternal mortality are the presence of skilled birth attendants and access to emergency obstetric care (according to the UNFPA); - Notes that with regard to the maternal mortality rate as prioritised within MDG 5, data from the UN Population Division has shown that countries with the tightest controls on abortion also enjoy lower rates of maternal mortality than countries where abortion is legal – and that countries with the most liberalised abortion laws have the highest maternal mortality rates; and that furthermore a recent study for the Finnish government found that women who abort are four times more likely to die within a year than are women who carry to term; - promotion of gender equality - Calls for a greater recognition of the role of faith in societies, specifically those faiths which are not predicated on the religiously-sanctioned subjugation of women, to safeguard – from the heart – the fundamental moral equality of women; - Notes with alarm the UNFPA’s State of the World Population Report last year, which admits that there is a global deficit of 60,000,000 women in the world, and that these ‘missing’ females have been prenatally sex-selected, aborted, and infanticised out of existence; and therefore condemns in the strongest possible terms the ‘woman’s right to choose’ ideology, which has indeed resulted in women choosing to abort babies solely due to their female gender; - Calls on the Commission to instruct all of the Union’s partners around the world (both governments and NGOs), who provide sexual health services, to undertake a permanent gender analysis of all EU funded and partially funded abortions; and to routinely report these findings to Parliament; - Whilst noting that due to the widespread existence of sex-selected abortions in the developing world, and until sexual and reproductive health services can be demonstrated to be gender-neutral in their application, sexual and reproductive health services should be taken to expressly exclude abortion; - empowerment of women and rights of the child - Recalls the late Benazir Bhutto’s generally forgotten opening of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995: “To please her husband, a woman wants a son. To keep her husband from abandoning her, a woman wants a son. And, too often, when a woman expects a girl, she abets her husband in abandoning or aborting that innocent, perfectly formed child.”; Mrs Bhutto went on say that she heard “the cries of the girl child,” and added that “this conference needs to chart a course that can create a climate where the girl child is as welcome and valued as the boy child.”; - Acknowledging that the empowerment of women and the rights of the child start in the womb, recognises the strong commitment the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states in its preamble that "the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth," and seeks to make this principle its own by promoting this core value in all aspects of EU policy making; - in particular situations where gender- based violence is pervasive and- Deplores in the strongest possible terms the virtual chattel status of women trapped under Sharia law, and understands this oppression to represent the diametric opposite of every principle which the EU holds to be paramount; - situations where women and children are put at risk of HIV/AIDS, or denied access to information, prevention and/or treatment;