This weekend, the Christian Science Monitor published an article called, “Amid war Afghanistan trains thousands of new midwives.” The article says:

Pashtoon Azfar, head of the Afghan Midwives Association, says the number of trained midwives has grown nearly six-fold since rebuilding effort in Afghanistan began. “In 2002, we had 467 midwives, but no one knew how qualified they were; for years, they had received no access to training,” says Ms. Azfar, also a midwifery specialist with the international nonprofit health organization Jhpiego, whose maternal health programs are funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Today, there are more than 2,400 midwives around the country who have been trained in a standardized and accredited two-year program, she says.

We know that real progress in reducing maternal mortality cannot be achieved without strengthening health systems. This includes addressing serious gaps, including 1.1 million health care professionals (midwives, nurses, doctors, and specialists) and managers by 2015 around the world. Though midwives can help save the  lives of mothers around the world, training programs can do so much more. The article continues:

“If people think a midwife in their family will be contributing to the household, fathers and brothers will support their mothers and wives and daughters,” says Azfar. “If a woman has any economic role in the family, for sure she has some decisionmaking role as well. That is why I am an advocate of this. It is not just for midwifery – it is for change.”

We believe that women are at the heart of the economic world. And we know what it costs global economies to lose over 560,000 women a year in pregnancy and childbirth. One of the key parts of this article that gave me such hope was this:

When an older woman tells a girl living next door she is too young to join the session, the midwives intervene. The more learning, the better, they say, in a country plagued by the world’s second-highest maternal mortality rate.

Photo by: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Today, Women’s eNews published a story called, “Water Is Key to Reducing Maternal Mortality.”

Water use has grown at more than twice the rate of the world’s population over the past century, mostly for agricultural purposes, according to the 2009 United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report. This has left 884 million people at risk for–or already facing–a water shortage. And though we rarely think of the connection between maternal health and water, it’s one of the most important elements for women’s health. When women don’t have clean latrines and hand-washing stations, they often have poor hygiene practices that can lead to the spread of waterborne illnesses such as cholera, diarrhea, hepatitis and typhoid fever.

To disrupt this cycle, EngenderHealth and the Maternal Health Task Force are launching a fellowship program with Ashoka, an organization of social entrepreneurs with headquarters in Arlington, Va., to focus on improving maternal health in the world’s poorest nations. The initiative will concentrate on parts of the world with the highest maternal and child mortality rates, says Tim Thomas, senior advisor of the Maternal Health Task Force at EngenderHealth.

“Women’s health and empowerment is at the heart of all the development goals. I don’t think any of them can be achieved unless we scale up a full range of reproductive health services and policies for women in every part of the world,” said Thomas. “There’s such great momentum around maternal health because the crux of women’s reproductive health and rights is the saving of lives of women who are dying needlessly because of pregnancy or childbirth.”

Improving women’s access to clean water is directly linked to increasing their life expectancy. For example, a 2006 WHO survey found that women in countries such as Tanzania were only expected to live to the age of 51; one of the causes of death was consuming excessive levels of fluoride found in contaminated water. Those who do survive in countries with unsafe water have to deal with side effects like stiff joints.

Photo via Physicians for Human Rights.

Yesterday, the world’s largest malaria conference, The 5^th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Conference, opened with a call for substantial and sustained support for research to guide evidence-based policies and the development of new malaria tools, which together could save countless lives. Watch this interview video with Dr. Rose Leke, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon, where she discusses the dangers of malaria during pregnancy — and how to prevent it.

Pregnant women are the most vulnerable adult population to malaria. Pregnancy decreases the level of immunity that most adult women in high-transmission areas develop.  The CDC estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa malaria causes some 400,000 cases of severe maternal anemia a year leading to roughly 10,000 deaths and from 75-200,000 infant deaths a year.

For these reasons, pregnant women have been designated a high-priority population by Roll-Back Malaria. The WHO suggests a two-pronged approach to protect pregnant women in Africa: provide bed nets and intermittent preventive treatment (IPT). Bed nets have been widely acknowledged as the most effective form of prevention currently available, and IPT involves giving mothers preventive treatment with an anti-malaria drug. It has shown to cause 23% fewer low birth-weight babies. These technologies are available and relatively cheap, but there are still large barriers to universal access.

Women Deliver applauds President Obama’s announcement that the US will end the “HIV Travel Ban,” which has barred entry to the US for HIV-positive visitors and immigrants since 1987. Until this historic announcement, the US was one of only 7 countries with laws that ban entry of people with HIV. Read President Obama’s remarks.

The BBC published a story on maternal mortality is which they say: “The US spends more money on mothers’ health than any other nation in the world, yet women in America are more likely to die during childbirth than they are in most other developed countries, according to the OECD and WHO. The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan has been trying to find out why.” In fact, the US is ranked 41st among all nations in lifetime risk of death from pregnancy-related causes. Though the US is still well-above some of the most hard-time countries for maternal mortality (like Niger where 1 in 7 women will die), it’s shocking that a country as wealthy and technologically advanced allows this tragedy to continue. Read more from the BBC article, and find out why maternal mortality is so high in the US here.

Below is the speech delivered by Imane Khachani, MD, Msc, from the Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights for the High-Level Meeting at the International Parliamentarians’ Conference on the Implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action.

This weekend, the NY Times published a story about a bill that has been introduced in the Philippines to increase contraceptive use. In the Philippines, birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system, but 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care, according to the article. More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change that. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services, including condoms, birth control pills, tubal ligations and vasectomies. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school. The article refers to a Guttmacher Institute report, and says:

…54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended. Most of those unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed. Those unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that year, despite a ban on the procedure. Most of the abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions.

Download Women Deliver’s “Focus on 5: Women’s Health and the MDGs” to advocate to your policy makers about the need to prioritize reproductive health.

Photo: Luis Liwanag for the International Herald Tribune

The New York Times reports that Sheldon J. Segal, who led the scientific team that developed Norplant, the first significant advance in birth control since the pill, and who also developed other long-acting contraceptives, died at his home in Woods Hole, Mass., on Saturday. He was 83.

Population Council has created a tribute to Segal that you can read here, and you can write your own thoughts here. Feel free to also share your memories and thoughts in the comments below as we honor a hero and pioneer in the world of family planning.

Photo: Lew Merrim/Monkmeyer

This blog-post was originally published at Conversations for a Better World, a shared blog on population gender and health.

Women around the world have had to struggle for decades, for centuries, to achieve equal rights and to achieve the human rights every man and woman deserves. And while the struggle has resulted in many positive steps forward, there are still areas where women are considered less than their male counterparts.

Their lives are considered less important. Why else would the world allow over 560,000 women to die in pregnancy and childbirth every year? I often think, “If it were men who got pregnant, men who lay on steel delivery tables every day, who bled and hemorrhaged and died… would governments be standing idly by?”

Increased contraceptive use has led to fewer abortions worldwide, but deaths from unsafe abortion remain a severe problem, killing 70,000 women a year, according to a major global survey from the Guttmacher Institute.

The report, “Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress,” states that almost all unsafe abortions were in less developed countries with restrictive abortion laws, and more than half the deaths, about 38,000, were in sub-Saharan Africa, which was singled out as the region with by far the lowest rates of contraceptive use and the highest rates of unintended pregnancies. “In almost all developed countries, abortion is safe and legal,” said Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute. “But in much of the developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women’s health and threaten their survival.”

The report notes that abortions worldwide are declining even as more countries liberalize their abortion laws. Since 1997, it said, only three countries — Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador — substantially increased restrictions on abortion, while laws were eased significantly in 19 countries and regions, including Cambodia, Nepal and Mexico City.
Despite this trend, the report said 40 percent of the world’s women live in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws, virtually all of them in the developing world. This category includes 92 percent of the women in Africa and 97 percent in Latin America.

To read more, click here.