Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is really amazing that we only hear voices of agreement in this Chamber this evening when behind the scenes so many obscure forces are trying to undermine the regulation and the financing of it. This has to do with the fact that the right to autonomous control over your body, your fertility and reproduction has never been completely accepted. In some circles people evidently still do not understand that women cannot be denied this right. Nor men either, but there has always been more sympathy for that in the past. When we consider the situation today, we see big differences in theory and in practice. If we look at the European Union, we find something that has not been discussed today that there are many cases in which men’s, and especially women’s, desires with regard to having children cannot be fulfilled because this is so difficult to combine with a demanding professional life and a busy life in general. Up to now we have not seen this as a collective problem. But in any case we know that very many women would like more children than the average 1.4 per family that, for example, is reached in Belgium. In the third world it tends to be the other way round. Of course a woman’s fertility is a blessing there too, but it is also a curse because the number of children born is often more than the number she wants and more than she can give a decent upbringing to. That is, of course, because of the poverty in which the women and children live, as, of course, do the men too, but the number of women in the third world having to bring up children on their own is increasing more and more. The situation is very grave. At the time of the elections in Kenya, a social worker in one of the slums of Nairobi told me that the women find it so difficult to bring up their children that they are refusing to marry, because then they would have another person to look after and one who hits them. Family life is so disrupted by poverty that they say: we would rather try on our own. Of course the children have different fathers who do not care about the women or the children. We have not explained the need for this programme at all, because if we had we would set all the budgetary concerns on one side and give it far more resources. But I was talking about the social implications. In the European Union and the other rich countries this leads to the phenomenon of an ageing population, in the poor countries it leads to overpopulation and worsening poverty that often takes on structural forms. But your regulation is absolutely not targeting those large-scale societal phenomena. It is actually elementary, the help, the access that women and men but especially women must have to escape the frightful consequences of unwanted pregnancy, the frightful consequences of rape and also the frightful consequences that occur in other communities. I heard of a case of Roma women who are sterilised against their will at the moment they give birth. They are made infertile without knowing it. All this results from ignorance, of course, but it mainly due to grinding poverty. That is why we will support the Commissioner and the rapporteur and those who submit amendments, in order to oppose those in the world who through their resistance attempt to smear these regulations, the resources and the people who are working hard to promote reproductive health. We will make every effort to get these financial resources increased in the future and to see that they are used well. In view of the spread of AIDS, it has to be said that all our resources are insufficient at the moment. Fortunately official policy has come back to that meanwhile but in Kenya a few years ago people used not to tell pregnant women infected with the HIV virus that they had it, because they did not have the means to do anything about it. Now fortunately we have the means to prevent this dreadful disease being passed from mother to child. That 36 million people have to live with the HIV virus and that millions die of it every year must surely make an impression on those who only care about unborn lives and leave those who have been born to suffer and die. (Applause)

Political group: Verts-ALE