Updates

Yesterday, 19 award nominees were announced at a high-level forum at the Savings Lives at Birth Development^xChange awards ceremony. Sponsored by USAID, the Government of Norway, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The World Bank, and Grand Challenges Canada, the “Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development” competition called out to the global community to submit proposals for innovations that would help save the lives of mothers and babies through three key areas: technology, service delivery, and demand. Read more...

Lawmakers, researchers, advocates, and survivors of maternal complications gathered on Capitol Hill last month to call attention to the worsening state of maternal health in the United States—as well as a new bill that could help answer why so many women die during pregnancy and childbirth in one of the world’s most developed nations. Read more...

USAID marks its 50th Anniversary this year. In the latest issue of PSI’s Impact magazine, Editor-in-Chief Marshall Stowell interviews senior USAID officials, including Susan Brems, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Global Health, and Scott Radloff, Director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health. Both share their thoughts on improving the health of women in developing countries and new technologies that promise to advance these efforts. Check out the interviews at http://www.psi.org/impact6.

This week the US Senate unanimously passed the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act, the first piece of legislation endorsed by the US government to address child marriage. Sponsored by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and Representative Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the law seeks to strengthen the US government’s role in preventing child marriage, expanding investments to empower young girls, and include child marriage in the State Department annual Human Rights Report. Read more...

Today is the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s approval of the use of the abortion drug mifepristone, also known as RU-486 or the "abortion pill", in combination with the second drug, misoprostol. Marketed as Mifeprix, this alternative to surgical abortion for terminating early pregnancies has seen a substantial increase in use in the past decade, allowing many women a choice between medication or a surgical procedure when seeking an early abortion. While the number of medication abortions and providers offering them increased, the total number of abortions performed in the U.S. declined. However, the expectation that abortion access would improve, especially in rural areas, was not realized, according to a Guttmacher Institute report released last year.

Click here for more information:
Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States
The incidence of abortion in the United States
The effect of mifepristone on abortion access

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment to permanently repeal the Global Gag Rule, which prohibited organizations who performed or promoted abortion from receiving US funding. Though President Obama signed an executive order upon taking office in January 2009 that officially rescinded the Global Gag Rule, this amendment will prevent future administrations from reinstating it. The amendment was sponsored by Sen. Lautenberg and co-sponsored by Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and was passed with a vote of 17–11.

“The biggest enemy of women’s health and rights is political indifference”, Jill Sheffield, President of Women Deliver remarked during the opening plenary session. The Parliamentarians’ Forum on “Delivering Solutions, Delivering Resources, Delivering Leadership: The Role of Parliamentarians in advancing Maternal Health” was dedicated to prevent just that and discussed the way forward to achieve MDG 5 in the remaining five years from a Parliamentarians’ angle.

The Parliamentarians’ Forum culminated in a Parliamentarians’ Statement. Amongst others, Parliamentarians called for additional US $12 billion a year to be invested in women and girls and  to actively work towards the establishment of a global funding mechanism for family planning, mothers and children with other international donors. The statement urges Ministers to establish realistic and verifiable annual action plans for reaching individual MDG targets with a special emphasis on MDG 5 (a and b) to be presented at the UN High Level Meeting on the MDGs and commit to take a leading role in communicating the societal, economic, political and cultural benefits of investing in women and girls to key stakeholders. The full statement is attached.

Watch Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, as she addresses and opens the Women Deliver 2010 conference and calls for greater attention and action for maternal health, reproductive health, and women's health around the world. "Women deliver for the world," she says. "Now the world needs to deliver for women."

Women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 40 other countries, according to a new report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA, by Amnesty International. And while countries around the world are fighting to reduce maternal mortality to meet Millennium Development Goal 5, maternal mortality ratios have more than doubled in the US from 1987 to 2006...

The United States released an updated budget for the Global Health Initiative (GHI) showing plans to invest $63 billion over six years (2009-2014) to help partner countries improve health outcomes through strengthened health systems - with a particular focus on improving the health of women, newborns and children through programs including infectious disease, nutrition, maternal and child health, and safe water.