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Valerie Huber, the president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Health, speaks to EWTN Pro-Life Weekly on Thursday, May 23, 2024 / EWTN News
CNA Staff, May 24, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).
One woman is working with world leaders to promote women’s health without also submitting to the pro-abortion ideologies that often come with international aid.
President of the Institute for Women’s Health Valerie Huber spoke with EWTN News President Montse Alvarado on “EWTN Pro-Life Weekly” Thursday about current worldwide efforts to support women’s health from conception until death.
Huber founded the institute after completing her service as the first special representative for global women’s health under former President Donald Trump.
“I had the whole world, but only one focus, and that was promoting women’s health,” she told Alvarado about her tenure in public service. “And to ensure that health was not equated with abortion, because it shouldn’t be, and it’s not.”
Since then, through the Institute, Huber has continued her outreach to various nations to encourage them and provide them with support.
For example, Huber recently worked with the first lady of Uganda to launch the Women’s Optimal Health Framework, a new initiative developed with the pro-life government of Guatemala that marks the “first life-affirming, family-strengthening framework that ministries of health can use in these countries to affirm every life.”
“It’s looking holistically at helping a woman receive optimal health,” Huber said. “That’s not just physical health. It’s emotional health. It’s intellectual health, [it’s] physical health, it’s spiritual health,” she said.
“There’s not another framework that takes these elements, empowers a government and literally empowers a woman and a girl at that community level to have opportunities that she has not had in the past.”
Huber noted that many countries are pressured to promote abortion ideology or else their aid will be taken away.
“What we want to be as the Institute for Women’s Health is that encourager that not only encourages them to stand but gives them the tools and the resources so they can stand,” she said.
This can be a challenge when many U.S. allies equate women’s health with abortion, Huber said.
“When I was special representative for global women’s health, I saw that women’s health had experienced a devolution where women’s health was being equated with abortion,” Huber said. “It’s just not true. It’s very limiting. It’s a narrative that leaves women who are dying every day behind with no assistance for anything else.”
“Our goal really was to put the focus where it should be, and that is: look at those authentically vulnerable women and girls in countries around the world to which the United States provides foreign assistance, other countries provide foreign assistance.”
When she proposed during the Trump administration that other nations work with the U.S. to address “unsolved conditions” for women worldwide, she found that no countries would “agree to leave abortion out of that equation in order to promote women’s health.”
“I saw that even though at that time, the U.S. administration was very pro-life, many of our traditional allies were not,” she said. “What did that tell me? It told me that the priority was not really helping the women who needed help. It was promoting ideology above women’s health, and actually that women were being used as a vehicle for ideology.”
“It was based on that that I started having conversations with countries that were pro-life, pro-family, that wanted to make genuine improvements to the health of their women and girls,” she continued. “But they were being held back by these conditions that were standing in the way.”
During her time as a representative, she united the U.S. with Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, and Uganda and numerous other countries by initiating the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which stipulated several pro-family principles and rejected the premise of a “human right” to abortion.
Representatives from 37 different nations have signed the declaration, including Sudan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Paraguay, and Poland.
The declaration upheld several principles, Huber noted, including that “the family is foundational to society,” that “there is no international right to abortion; it’s not a human right,” and that “the sovereign right of countries to defend life, family, and women’s health with their own laws and not have external meddling, forcing them or pressuring them to change.”
“It created a coalition of nations that said, regardless of where we are, we commit to improve health and thriving for women and girls,” she said.
Archbishop J. Michael Miller celebrates Mass at Sacred Heart Church in Delta before the March for Life in Victoria, British Columbia, on May 9, 2024. He prayed that they “may be worthy and effective messengers of hope.” / Credit: Paul Schratz
V… […]
Pro-life supporters march in this year’s March for Life in Ottawa, Canada, May 9, 2024. / Credit: Peter Stockland
Ottawa, Canada, May 10, 2024 / 16:00 pm (CNA).
Thousands of pro-lifers packed onto Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, and spilled out onto Wellington Street on May 9 for the 27th annual National March for Life.
The diverse crowd gathered on the Hill at noon with its members bearing both homemade and professionally crafted signs pledging them to stand fast for the unborn and vulnerable.
The march’s theme, “I Will Never Forget You” was taken from the prophet Isaiah’s poignant question: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast?”
The rally and march were broadcast live by the U.S. cable network EWTN. (Editor’s note: EWTN is the parent company of Catholic News Agency.)
This year’s speakers included pro-life speaker and author Abby Johnson, President of 40 Days for Life Shawn Carney, and Campaign Life Coalition Vice-Chair Jeff Gunnarson.
The opening prayer was led by Father Daniel Szwarc, OMI, who traveled to Ottawa from the Arctic Circle together with three young women engaged in pro-life activities in their small Inuit village of Naujaat.
Diana Kringayark told the crowd that every week she and the other women buy baby products to distribute to 40 village families to show that “every baby is important.”
Ottawa Archbishop Marcel Damphousse encouraged the marchers to act with “courage, compassion, and conviction.”
Conservative members of Parliament Cathay Wagantall and Arnold Viersen were the only federal politicians to address the crowd.
In her brief speech, Wagantall emphasized that advocating for the unborn and the vulnerable is particularly difficult for Canadian politicians. But she hailed the number of young people in the crowd as a sign of hope.
“If you think it is a battle out here, you know it is a battle in there,” the Saskatchewan member of Parliament said, indicating the Houses of Parliament behind her.
Angelina Steenstra of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign introduced Nathalia Comrie, a young woman who, at 17, was pregnant and felt that “abortion was the only choice my family would accept.” She said she was told that “everything would go back to normal after the abortion.”
“That was a lie,” Comrie said. After years of depression and substance abuse, she was introduced to the Sisters of Life, and through them to other women who, like her, had suffered as the result of abortion.
“I will never forget my son Kaeden. He is why I am silent no more,” Comrie said.
In the crowd of clergy, habited religious sisters, elderly, schoolchildren, and loud teenagers were women who had found themselves, like Comrie, in situations where they felt pressured and alone.
Christa Ranson came to the March for Life from Montreal because she knew what it was to have considered abortion.
Ranson had been scheduled to undergo an abortion on two separate occasions. The first time she was actually on the table being prepped for the abortion when she decided not to go through with it. The second time, after hearing her son’s heartbeat by ultrasound, Ranson decided she “just couldn’t do it.”
Ranson said she now tells her son: “I loved you when you were just a heartbeat.”
When asked why it was important for her to come to the March for Life, she told Canada’s The Catholic Register that it was to let women know there is a choice other than abortion.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is that, when you are on that table, those babies are living, they have a heart, they have feelings.”
“I want other women to know that even if it is difficult, it will be okay and it is worth it. If women are making the decision because of health reasons, or financial reasons, they should reach out. There are resources out there, there are doctors out there who will help.”
This article was originally published by Canada’s The Catholic Register and is reprinted here with permission.
The pro-life flag from the Pro-Life Flag Project (www.prolifeflag.com). / Credit: Pro-Life Flag Project (www.prolifeflag.com)
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Participants in Italy’s pro-life demonstration in Rome on May 21, 2022. / Credit: Daniel Ibáñez/CNA
Rome, Italy, Apr 22, 2024 / 14:15 pm (CNA).
An amendment to a health care law that permits “nonprofits with experience providing maternity support” in family planning clinics, including pro-life groups, will be voted on by the Italian Senate on Tuesday, April 23, according to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Amendment No. 44.028, a provision attached to a health care system law, part of Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), would allow local public health authorities to freely collaborate with qualified third-party consultants, including nonprofit organizations that specialize in pregnancy and maternity support, “without new or greater burdens on public finance,” according to the news site Centro Studi Livatino.
Last week, the Brothers of Italy party, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, introduced the amendment to the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house of Parliament. On April 18, the amendment passed by a vote of 140-91 and is also expected to pass the Senate, Italy’s upper house of Parliament, this week.
In relation to the inclusion of pro-life groups in pregnancy counseling centers, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, said to journalists on Sunday: “We are in favor of life and of all those instruments that can affirm the right to life, especially for women in difficulty.”
Since 1978, abortion has been legal in Italy for the first 90 days of pregnancy. Women opting for an abortion — particularly for cases in which the pregnancy is beyond the first trimester — can obtain a certificate attesting to the health risk of her pregnancy from either a public or private health authority, including family planning clinics.
In addition, Article 31 of Italy’s constitution outlines the duty of the state to assist with “the formation of the family” through “economic measures and other benefits, and “protect mothers, children, and the young by adopting necessary provisions.”
The prospect of having pro-life groups and associations provide counsel or services in family planning clinics continues to spur heated debate among the media as well as activist groups in Italy and across Europe.
According to Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s minister for the family, this amendment does not subvert, and is consistent with, Italy’s abortion law (Law 194/1978).
Article 2 of the Italian abortion law already establishes that family counseling centers should “assist pregnant women” and help them “to overcome the factors which might lead the woman to have her pregnancy terminated.”
However, Gilda Sportiello, a member of Parliament representing the Five Stars Movement, argued that a woman should ultimately have the right to choose whether to be a mother or not.
“No woman who wants to interrupt her pregnancy should feel attacked by the state,” she said after speaking out in Parliament about her choice to have an abortion 14 years ago.
Italian journalist Antonella Mariani offered a different view, saying this health care amendment would afford women more options, information, protection, and support when making their own decision about pregnancy.
“Those who truly care about women’s self-determination should consider that it is not one-way: That is, it does not only concern the freedom to have an abortion but also the freedom not to have an abortion,” she said, as reported on the Italian news site Avvenire.
The Rosario Livatino Study Centre — a group of jurists inspired by the life and example of Blessed Rosario Livatino who research issues concerning family, the right to life, religious freedom, and legal matters — published an editorial written by one of its members in relation to the health care proposal.
A member of the center and a lawyer, Francesco Farri, according to Centro Studi Livatino, wrote that the amendment to be voted on in the Senate this week does not “innovate” but “confirms” current Italian law: “The 194, it should be remembered, does not only concern the voluntary interruption of pregnancy but also ‘norms for the social protection of maternity.’”
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