Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2017-03-14-Speech-2-566-000"
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"en.20170314.34.2-566-000"2
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"Mr President, this is an extremely important debate, and I am glad we are having it in the week when we are debating women’s issues after International Women’s Day and just a few days after the conference in Brussels on ‘She Decides’.
This is a debate we should not really be having, because a woman’s access to family planning should not be a political football to be given and withdrawn depending on who is in government. In particular, it does not seem right to me that it is a decision that has been taken by people who will not be affected by it. People here will not be affected by this decision, and certainly the men who surrounded President Trump when he signed it into law will not be affected by this decision. It is the poor women in the world, and the poorest countries in the world, who will pay the price – the women we heard from at the ‘She Decides’ conference on 2 March.
So if we are serious – as the Commissioner said – about the SDGs and gender equality, we cannot afford the cuts that have been talked about. An estimated 225 million women globally lack access to modern contraception. Every day, 830 women die from preventable causes linked to pregnancy and childbirth. That is over 30 an hour. It is one since I started speaking to you. As we have just heard from Mrs Corazza Bildt, no family planning means other problems, such as HIV and other issues. Let us make no mistake about it: cutting this funding does not mean fewer abortions. All the evidence from the last period when the gag was in place shows that the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions increased when the global gag came in. Mrs Corazza Bildt has just told us about the consequences and what happens to women when that happens. So this policy is not a success story, and that is why she said that we must step in. But we must also step up now.
So what can we do here in the EU to counter this policy? Well, we voted today. We voted for the report by Claire Moody this morning with a very big majority, calling for EU funds to counter the cuts caused by the global gag. We can support the ‘She Decides’ initiative, and I pay tribute here to Lilianne Ploumen and the Swedish, Danish and Belgian Ministers who organised that conference and brought over 50 countries together to raise funding. We can also look at our own wider funding and prioritise SRHR spending in our own plans. We have got a review of the DCI coming up and of the EDF in the mid—term. Let us look at what we are doing already.
Commissioner, you indicated that the Commission was willing to do this and will be talking about it in the Council on Thursday with Ministers. I hope you will come back soon and tell us that the funding is being made available and that we will back the ‘She Decides’ initiative. Looking around this room, many of us here – mainly women here, but men as well – have made choices about our own fertility and if and when to have children. It is not a first world right, it is a right for every woman, wherever she lives. Commissioner, I know that you will be supportive on this, but we need the support of the whole Commission and Ministers to make sure that women are not let down after this gag comes into place."@en1
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