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OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to champion maternal and child health on the international stage has turned into a political fracas at home over the right of the world's poorest women to use contraceptives and have safe abortions.
The Harper government has not directly said whether reproductive rights will be part of the prime minister's initiative when he hosts the G8 summit in June.
And its ambiguous responses have opened the door to opposition charges that the government believes birth control has nothing to do with saving women's lives.
"I ask the prime minister, is Canada's signature initiative at the G8 going to be the 'no condoms for Africa' strategy?" NDP Leader Jack Layton taunted in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda repeated the government's line that the initiative is "about saving the lives of mothers and children," without offering detail.
A government official later said details are being developed in concert with Canada's other G8 partners. He said it's unlikely U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders would agree to anything that ignored or tried to roll back reproductive rights.
Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Harper, alluded to the same point, saying: "G8 leaders will discuss and aim to agree on the way forward to tackle child and maternal health."
In the same vein, Oda told the Commons her G8 colleagues have "applauded" Harper's initiative and pointedly referred to Canada's G8 partners as "enlightened" countries.
Still, the government has avoided precision on the matter, perhaps unwilling to alienate ardent pro-lifers among its core supporters who are hoping the G8 initiative will refuse funding for programs that advocate access to safe abortions.
In the Commons, Oda dodged several direct questions on the issue.
She recounted statistics - that 500,000 women die each year during pregnancy and childbirth, with about 75 per cent of maternal deaths occurring within 48 hours of delivery.
"This hard fact is something we can do something about and that is what we intend to do at our G8 (summit), along with our colleagues," she said.
Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, a physician who has delivered thousands of babies, interpreted Oda's remarks as meaning the initiative is aimed at helping only those women who die within two days of bearing a child.
She accused the minister of "wilfully ignoring" research which shows 215 million women are denied access to contraceptive services and that 1.5 million of them die each year as a result.
She predicted Harper's G8 initiative is "doomed for failure because Conservative party ideology does not think that birth control has anything to do with saving lives of women and their children."
Outside the Commons, Bennett was joined by other female Liberal MPs in excoriating the government for its purported failure to understand that women often die in child birth or shortly thereafter precisely because they've had no access to contraceptives to help them space their pregnancies and curb the size of their families.
