No food…but plenty of condoms

Posted: 25 July 2012

I opened the newspaper this week to read the headline that Australia will be doubling an aspect of its foreign aid to $50 million to assist the poor women of the world. What a wonderful idea. Perhaps the aid will be going towards vital medication to women in Sub-Saharan Africa; perhaps food and vitamins to women in South Asia; or perhaps it will pay for education and training in more effective farming methods? No. The money will go completely towards ‘family planning’. And not just our $50 million, add to that half a billion dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a total amount from worldwide governments and the private sector of $2.6 billion. This amount was committed during the recently held family planning summit in London. So that is $2.6 billion for condoms, contraceptive pills and IUDs (small devices placed in the uterus which release a chemical to prevent pregnancy). Add to this an army of frontline health workers to go into these far flung places and educate women about how to best stop having children. This is family planning that has as its aim the destruction of the family.

The money will go to sustain the current contraceptive use by 260 million women in 69 of the world’s poorest nations. It will further ‘help’ another 222 million women who want to use contraception but do not have access to it. I wonder who spoke to these 222 million women? It is no secret that much foreign aid has for years been dependent on women signing up to family planning programs. If you have five hungry children and your next ration pack is dependent on having a device stuck up your uterus, it may not leave a great deal of choice. As we all know a mother will sacrifice everything for her children, and in this case her very dignity as a woman. Too often it is truckloads of contraceptives that make it across war-torn and famine-ridden borders instead of truckloads of food, water and medicines.

A number of the reports from the family planning summit speak about the challenges faced in implementing family planning programs including places where contraception is seen as unacceptable due to culture or religion. Does that mean that the Atheistic West with all its money and superiority is going to charge on into nations and, one family at a time, cut down the pillars of culture and faith that make these people who they are? The Western world has so enthusiastically embraced contraception that many nations in Europe are no longer even replacing their own population. The immigration we so heavily rely on in Australia is coming from the very nations whose populations we want to destroy.

At the heart of all this is a loss of seeing fertility as a good. The very essence of a woman is that she can bear new life. Some women may never be able to conceive through no fault of their own but that is very different to taking the greatest aspect of femininity and killing it with a cocktail of chemicals. Ironically in the 21st century we are very conscious of what we eat, yet millions upon millions of women continuously ingest harmful chemicals to stop what is a perfectly normal process. Contraception is the only ‘medication’ given to someone who is completely healthy to stop them being completely healthy. Instead of educating women (and men) about how their bodies work we create chemicals to override them. Just last month another two lawsuits were filed against one of the largest manufacturers of the IUD. The incident involved the IUD device migrating from the location where it was implanted so that the women were forced to undergo a hysterectomy and now suffer ongoing pain and permanent injury.

The notion of ‘family planning’ that is promoted by wealthy companies such as Marie Stopes International and Planned Parenthood (the largest providers of abortion in the world) has infected completely the governments of the secular western world. The mentality has also spread to most international aid organisations that purport to be pro child. (Think carefully next time you get bowled up in a shopping centre and asked to sponsor children in Africa).

Having sacrificed our own women and daughters to the god of sterility we now seek to go into the bodies of women and girls in developing nations, and treating them like nothing better than cattle, inject them with drugs that ‘we know’ will be for their own good. The situation is an international disgrace.

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Violence again Women. Australia says…Yes

Posted: 7 July 2012

In 2004 the Federal Government funded a $20 million campaign with the slogan, ‘Violence against Women. Australia Say No.’ The campaign was to bring awareness of violence occurring behind closed doors. As part of the campaign a TV ad was produced with a selection of men justifying why they assaulted women and the slogan making it clear that such behaviour was not tolerable. More recently a government campaign was launched called ’The Line’ which encouraged young people to consider where they would draw the line regarding issues such as ‘hooking up’ sexually at parties. The message in response to this possible quandary was not to engage sexually with someone unless there was mutual consent.

It may seem on face value that Australia is serious about stamping out abuse but I wonder just how serious we really are. While all these sorts of campaigns are of some value they fall into the interesting category of a secular government trying to teach morality. While a government may make laws to try and enact a particular behaviour they are seemingly unable to plug the illogical and confusing holes that appear in their attempts.

The last remaining ‘virtue’ in secular morality is consent. With consent two people can do whatever they wish, without consent, or with consent withdrawn at any time, one of those people becomes a criminal. According to the logic of the aforementioned campaigns so long as a woman says the word ‘yes’ a man is at rights to enjoy her sexually and vice versa. This would mean it is ‘moral’ for a man to go out to a different bar every night and find a woman who is lonely, needy or broken enough, that with a little kindness (and a couple of glasses of alcohol) he can have sex with on that night and walk away the next morning. If bars are not his scene he is legally able to buy consent with one of the estimated 20,000 people engaging in some form of prostitution across Australia in any one year. While it is obviously hard to gauge correct figures, one statistic to emerge from a poll was that 15 per cent of men sampled had visited a prostitute. Some samples have suggested as many as 40 per cent of the male population have visited or will visit a prostitute at some point in their life.

So whether one is obtaining sexual pleasure by scanning the bars and clubs or by scanning the Yellow Pages for ‘Adult Services’ there is no mention of what effect this has on the emotional and mental well being of vulnerable women. Completely leaving aside the social costs of marital infidelity, the fact that the rise of ‘legal’ internet pornography is changing the way men understand their own sexuality and the epidemic of sexually transmitted infections…what is this social acceptance of commitment-free sex doing to us?

Allow me to tell you what it is doing. When society advocates consent as the only moral compass and thinks that violence is only possible when someone withdraws that consent it completely negates that we are often broken and hurt people. Some of us have a tendency to use others and others of us have a tendency to allow ourselves to be used. Deep down we all want the same thing, love, but more often than not we get confused about how to find it.

The notion of free-sex and legal prostitution sends the very clear message that a person is an object and in some situations we can use them as such. While most people would not advocate me selling myself to be used as a punching bag, we seem to think it is ok to violate the body of a woman we don’t even know so long as she says yes. The word yes however is easy to say. If a woman is alone and someone is showing her attention, she may say yes. If a woman is desperate for drugs or money, she may say yes. That does not mean in any way that the actions she is saying yes to, are of benefit to her overall well being.

A nation which allows its citizens to treat the most needy and vulnerable as objects for another person’s pleasure is not a nation that genuinely understands the human condition. We can roll out all the feel-good campaigns we want about anti-violence and the importance of consent but until we acknowledge that all people, no matter how desperate they are have a right to be treated with complete dignity, then we actually do advocate certain types of violence in certain situations.

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