Failing to Deliver on Maternal Health

Grace Melton / June 14, 2010

Last week thousands of women (and more than a few men, too) attended the Women Deliver 2010 conference on reproductive and maternal health in Washington, D.C. The Women Deliver conference organizers were supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UNAIDS, UNICEF, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the conference was partially funded by U.S. taxpayers. The conference advisory group included private organizations such as Amnesty International, Family Care International (FCI), and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), whose leaders featured prominently in the discussions and concurrent sessions.

Meetings on the conference’s politically polarized agenda ranged in focus from human rights and legal issues, such as sessions titled “Without Sexual Rights There is No Maternal Health” and “Why, When, and How to Take a Government to Court for Maternal Deaths,” to a diverting (and almost certainly heat-producing) discussion on climate change called “Condoms and Climate Change: Can Family Planning Save the World?” Presentations on the potential of medical interventions and better healthcare delivery to continue recent improvements in maternal and newborn health, however, were relegated to side panels.  The overriding emphasis of the conference was on increased family planning and abortion projects as the primary tools in reducing maternal mortality and reaching the UN Millennium Development Goals. (more…)