Maureen Anne McTeer, Canadian author and lawyer, and the wife of Joe Clark, the 16th Prime Minister of Canada wrote an op-ed in The Globe and Mail this week with a message to Prime Minister Harper. She gets to the heart of it when she writes, "Canada has a historic opportunity to lead on this issue." With just one month to go before the G8/G20 summits, Canada is primed to make a real, strong, and lasting commitment to maternal health that can convince other G8/G20 countries to follow suit.
Updates
Corporate Partner: Delivering on the Promise for a Better Tomorrow
May 14th, 2010
By: Paula R. DeCola, Senior Director, External Medical Affairs, Pfizer, Inc
Global collective action is a pre-requisite to addressing the complex and interrelated development challenges that face our nations. International development is currently viewed as being a part of national security, which has traditionally been limited to measures related to military strength. It is now recognized that sharing knowledge, skills and other resources is a critical prelude to security, as well as to international relations and global advancement. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated that, “Development was once the province of humanitarians, charities, and governments looking to gain allies in global struggles. Today it is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative…”1
PICK UP THE PHONE: A Call on Maternal Health
May 12th, 2010
Tomorrow at 8pm (ET) the ONE campaign is holding an interactive conference call on maternal health with David Lane, ONE's President and CEO, and Christy Turlington Burns, who is holding a panel at Women Deliver on June 7 about the role of media in raising awareness around public health issues. She will also be previewing her new documentary film, NO WOMAN, NO CRY on Monday, 7 June 2010 at Women Deliver (see a list of all the cultural events at Women Deliver here). The call is sure to cover many topics of interest to Women Deliver, so I've included the information below in case you'd like to rsvp.
Celebrate Mother’s Day: News Round-Up
May 10th, 2010
Did you see all the amazing Mother’s Day articles that called attention to global maternal health and the need to provide for the hundreds of thousands of mothers who die in pregnancy and childbirth every year? Below are some of the highlights. A big thank you to every journalist, blogger, and author who chose to celebrate Mother's Day by drawing attention to the problem of maternal mortality around the world.
- Nicholas Kristof: “Celebrate: Save a Mother”
- Christy Turlington Burns: “Pull down the barriers to maternal health care access.”
- Senators Chris Dodd and Bill Frist: “Honoring mothers worldwide"
- Tamar Abrams: “Mothers shouldn’t have to fear for their lives”
- Ban Ki-moon: "Opinion: Women shouldn't die giving birth"
- The Huffington Post: “Countdown to Mother’s Day” series
Fifty Years Later – What the Pill Has Meant to Women
May 6th, 2010
At the Women Deliver 2010 conference, we will be hosting a full day symposium on “Technology: A Catalyst for Social Change.” The symposium is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the US FDA approval of oral contraception, and more broadly the role technology has played in a social transformation of women’s lives.
This week, two great articles were published on the 50th anniversary of the pill. In Sarah Boseley’s Global Health Blog in the Guardian, she writes about the need for the revolution that has been going on in affluent countries to move to the developing world, where 200 million women need or want contraception.