Quick Hit: Care about mothers? Support family planning

I was glad to see Nicholas Kristof use his Mother’s Day column to point out that the Republican war on contraception is killing mothers around the world.

“Here’s a Mother’s Day thought: There’s a way to save many of the world’s 350,000 women who die in childbirth each year. But it’s very controversial, for it’s called family planning.

Republicans in Congress have gone on the warpath this budget season against family planning programs at home and abroad. To illustrate the stakes, let me share a Mother’s Day story about a pregnant 30-year-old Somali woman named Hinda Hassan.

Ms. Hassan lived in a village near this remote town of Baligubadle in Somaliland (a self-ruling enclave carved from Somalia). She never used family planning, for none is available within several days’ walk. When her eighth child was still an infant, she became pregnant again.”

Hassan ended up dying in childbirth. Which, as Kristof notes, is not only tragic but also “infuriatingly unnecessary.” The Guttmacher Institute estimates that simply meeting the unmet need for contraception worldwide would prevent the deaths of 94,000 women who, like Hassan, die of pregnancy-related complications each year. And yet the anti-choice attacks on family planning funding, in the U.S. and abroad, just continue. Read the rest here.