Category: Health services
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Opposing the criminalisation of self-use of abortion pills
More officials in European governments seem to have discovered that women are buying MA pills over the internet and are having abortions outside their health systems. The immediate response to this is that these abortions are or should be “illegal”; indeed, they are illegal under the law in Ireland, the UK and Italy, if not…
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Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) – a blog in response to the May 18 Geneva meeting minutes
A blog by Marge Berer, Editor Reproductive Health Matters. Originally posted on the blog of JALI – the Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health I asked JALI if I could write a blog after I had read the minutes of the May 18 meeting in Geneva on the way forward for…
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The Brazilian government pays compensation for a maternal death taken up by CEDAW – a decision that has global implications
Lisa Hallgarten, RHM The Brazilian government has agreed to pay compensation for the death of a pregnant woman in 2002. The decision could have implications for governments around the world where women are dying from preventable deaths in pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. The Brazilian government’s move follows landmark decisions by the Committee on the Elimination…
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Race, Reproductive Politics and Reproductive Health Care in the Contemporary United States
This editorial from the journal Contraception offers an important analysis of population and family planning policy in the USA, both in the context of current politics and also from history, starting as far back as 100 years ago. Carole Joffe, Willie J. Parker From: Contraception [Editorial] July 2012 reprinted as a blog with kind permission of…
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Family planning and safe, legal abortion go hand in hand
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters One in three women in the UK will have an abortion in her lifetime, most of whom will have been using contraception of some kind. Yet since as long ago as the late 1930s, there has been a split in the UK between those who insisted on promoting contraception…
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The morning after: the beginnings of an assessment of the FP Summit
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters 13 July 2012 From a communications point of view, the FP Summit was a raving success. Newspapers, TV and radio all over the world covered it. Around the globe everyone reached by the media heard how wonderful family planning is and how neglected it has been, the Lancet launched…
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Making change happen is in the air
Marge Berer Editor, Reproductive Health Matters Below, are excerpts from my editorial in RHM 20(39) May 2012. This issue is about reducing maternal mortality, but the more I reflected on it the more I realised it had implications for this week’s summit on family planning. Making change happen is in the air, from the UN…
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Trends in maternal mortality 1990-2010: latest data
by Marge Berer Editor Reproductive Health Matters Thanks to the Millennium Development Goals and much work on the part of the UN, WHO, many governments and NGOs globally and nationally, the press and media are now highly attuned to what is happening as regards maternal mortality. An announcement by WHO on behalf of the United…
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Limitations of global estimates of maternal mortality – Nepal
The latest United Nations publication on global estimates of maternal mortality was released in May this year. Some of the news from this report is good, that despite big regional variations, overall maternal mortality is reducing at a global level. One limitation of the estimates is that they fail to shine a light on the…
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Maternal health: hospital delivery does not guarantee good care
Hospital delivery does not guarantee good care: recent cases of women who died in a referral hospital in a sub-Saharan African country Published on the British Medical Journal Guest Blog, 17 May 2012 A key focus of work in the field of safe motherhood has been on increasing deliveries in medical facilities with access to…