There has yet to be a decision in United States Congress on what funds for global women’s health, if any, will survive in the current 2018 national budget, a decision that is nearly six months overdue. But Donald Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence, a hard-line social conservative who is playing a larger role … Read more
It will soon be two years since the United Nations adopted a new 15-year development policy encapsulated in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This sprawling, ambitious agenda was designed partly to address the shortcomings of the Millennium Goals, the most disheartening of which for women was the failure to meet promises of improved maternal health … Read more
A respected medical journal and a leading American population research and policy organization have teamed up to create a commission to fill gaps and turn vague promises in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into real gains for women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. The initiative, sponsored by the London-based journal The Lancet and … Read more
Our planet is expected to have 11.2 billion people in 2100, according to the United Nations’ just-released revision of the medium world population projections. With a 2015 population of 7.3 billion, this represents an increase of 3.9 billion over the remainder of this century. The projected expansion of human numbers is very unevenly spread around the … Read more
The tragic deaths of more than a dozen women in India recently, after being sterilized in assembly-line style by a doctor and his assistants eager to cash in on as many procedures as possible on a given day — at least 83 in a few hours in this case — are the symptom of a … Read more
Latin American and Caribbean nations have pulled ahead of most other developing regions on numerous measures of economic growth and human progress in recent years. The region has one of the world’s lowest poverty levels; hunger has been reduced to under 5 percent of the regional population; primary school enrollment rivals that of rich nations; … Read more
LONDON — When Angelina Jolie and William Hague traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in March, the Hollywood star and the British foreign minister naturally attracted attention. But what they came for — to announce a plan by the British government to bring war rapists to justice — might have been met with … Read more
Nearly half the abortions that take place worldwide are now unsafe, with women in parts of Africa and Latin America faring the worst, a new report by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute in New York says. A staggering 97 percent of abortions in Africa — 100 percent in regions across central and … Read more
