Letter to the Organizing Committee of the Conference "Women Deliver" London, 20 October 2007 DELIVERED TO: Jill Sheffield, President, Family Care International and the Organizing Committee CC: Dr. Asha-Rose Migiro, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Conference Honorary Co-Chair CC: Hon. Mary Robinson, President of Realizing Rights and Conference Honorary Co-Chair WE, THE UNDERSIGNED ORGANIZATIONS, wish to express our profound disappointment and dismay that the Women Deliver conference has failed to meet its stated objective of addressing Millennium Development Goal 5, which is to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity. Delegates were invited to attend a global conference on the causes, prevention and treatment of the complications of pregnancy and childbirth which lead to the deaths of so many mothers, particularly in developing countries, and to consider effective solutions. Regrettably, the conference agenda was so preoccupied with promoting the ideology and practice of abortion that the genuine healthcare needs of women and children were virtually ignored in the plenary sessions and overwhelmed in the panel discussions. Numerous UN reports, such as The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics, have concluded that accurate data about maternal mortality, including abortion, are not available, especially for the developing world. Therefore, the presentation of unsubstantiated and unreliable data on illegal abortion as fact can only be seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead the conferees and the international community. To assert that "unsafe abortions" are only those that are illegal, and to subsequently imply that legal abortion is therefore safe, is both disingenuous and scientifically flawed. The fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) will not be collecting information on the morbidity and mortality related to legal abortion is unconscionable if there is truly a commitment to accurate and