The Right Side of History
Being International Women’s Day, numerous celebrations were taking place on the Hill, with lots of speeches inside the Chamber commemorating what is clearly an important occasion. Sadly, most women who really need to be remembered and respected will have no idea what this is all about.Every minute of every day, a woman dies in pregnancy. Half of the women in the world give birth on the floor or the dirt instead of a hospital or clinic. In fact, the leading cause of death among 15-19 year-old women is pregnancy and childbirth.Such statistics are numbing, but there’s more. At least two million girls worldwide “disappear” due to gender discrimination – a figure that includes some 400-500 aboriginal women in Canada. Given little societal value, girls are not vaccinated, not treated when they are sick, not educated, and often not even fed. Perhaps most troubling of all, women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by male violence than by war, cancer, malaria, and traffic accidents combined. More women have been killed by neglect and violence in the last 50 years than men have by all the wars of the 20th century.The cost of all this to the world is staggering – not just in the loss of lives, but also lost economy and the sheer loss of women potential to lead communities. All the speeches made in Ottawa today failed to take on the tone of urgency propelled by such statistics. It’s time to get on the right side of history.Increasingly, women are displaying the kind of intrepid conduct that would make any Academy Award winner blush. While the Western world has been displaying remarkable inaction by rationalizing that such brutal conduct comes with poverty or corruption, many of these forgotten women have had to take up their own cause.Look to Muhammad as an example. The subject of brutal and violent sexual domination, this young Ethiopian girl was sold as a second wife to a 60-year-old man and then suffered terrible fistula injuries as she attempted to give birth. A fistula is a hole between a woman’s birth canal and her internal organs caused by obstructed childbirth or sexual violence. Suffering in such a hopeless state, villagers took her to an exposed hut on the edge of her village and left her to be consumed by hyenas (this is hard to even write about). This was the age-old custom but she refused to accept it. She dragged herself to a hospital, where doctors cared for her injuries. There she learned to read and write and now works there as a nurse’s aide, helping young women in the same condition from which she had escaped.International women’s groups are now funding operations much like Muhammad’s. Tired of waiting for Western governments to “get their act together,” women are showing remarkable solidarity by taking their own future in their hands.Things are changing. The oppression of women is finally starting to appear on the international radar screen, as when Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced his government’s intention to focus on child and maternal health for the upcoming G8 sessions in Canada. How he will do that when his recent budget calls for a $4.5 billion dollar cut to CIDA funding over the next 5 years remains to be seen.It is always women that become the first casualty of anything – war, poverty, sickness, and death. Now they have become the new casualty of cost-cutting budgets. How we can stand up in the House and urge action while at the same time cut foreign aid is beyond me. Clearly, we have a long way to go, and half the world awaits our journey.