Holy See on preventing maternal mortality and fighting human traficking

(September 16, 2011) Despite the international community’s strong commitment to prevent maternal mortality and morbidity, the Holy See regrets that some 350,000 deaths occur annually during pregnancy and childbirth. This was expressed on Thursday by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s representative to the United Nations agencies in Geneva, during a Human Rights Council meeting on the elimination of preventable maternal mortality as a human right. Asserting that “every woman is equal in dignity to man” the archbishop called for broad social and legal changes to enhance women’s status, easy access to skilled medical and obstetric care and improving monitoring and evaluation of State obligations. However, Archbishop Tomasi voiced the Holy See’s strong disagreement with increasing access to contraception and family planning” and addressing so-called “unsafe abortion for women to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality. He asserted couples right to plan their family and reiterated that “abortion, which destroys existing human life, … is never an acceptable method of family planning.”
In another session earlier on Wednesday, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi told the United Nations Human Rights Council that trafficking is such a lucrative business that as soon as laws are passed to counter the practice, traffickers find new ways to continue the modern-day slave trade. The Vatican's representative to U.N. agencies in Geneva, said that an estimated 3 million people fall prey to traffickers each year and their trade generates more than $30 billion annually. International action rallying governments, law enforcement agencies, human rights organizations, faith groups and people of good will are needed to combat human trafficking, which primarily involves poor women and children, the archbishop told the council. As the world's economy has globalized, he said, so has the trade in human beings, which "exploits the extreme poverty and vulnerability of many women and minors who try to escape intolerable conditions of misery and violence." Governments have enacted anti-human-trafficking laws and the Catholic Church is vigorously fighting the scourge, but Archbishop Tomasi urged for more effort to eliminate the demand for prostitution and to strengthen a culture where the relationship between men and women is based on mutual "respect and not on merchandizing the body."