“Strengthening community health is critical to expanding voluntary family planning,” said A. Jean Affo, Chief of Party at Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) Benin at a recent Wilson Center event on the importance of community health systems to the sustainable development and stability of countries. In Benin, around half of the population lives in rural areas with a lack of access to quality healthcare services and information. Traditional attitudes and gender norms prevent women and couples from utilizing family planning methods, said Affo. Combined with early marriage, inadequate family planning leaves women and girls vulnerable to health issues associated with inadequate timing and spacing between pregnancies.

“We recognize that what we’re talking about is a journey, but we also recognize that people have dreams for themselves and what this is about is helping them achieve those dreams,” said Ellen Starbird, Director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at USAID, at a recent Wilson Center event about the importance of community health systems, with a particular focus on voluntary family planning and infectious disease prevention. This two-panel event focused on how USAID’s Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) project worked together with communities and partners to strengthen health systems and to support countries on the journey to self-reliance said Starbird.

The ongoing crisis at our southern border is exacerbating another, less visible, one—the crisis in elder and childcare in the United States. With baby boomers aging and more parents of young children working outside the home, our country’s need for non-familial caregivers is skyrocketing. Carework is growing five times faster than any other sector in our economy; in fact, it is set to become the largest paid occupation in the U.S. by next year. While US citizens are not keen to take these jobs, migrants, especially women, are. But the current bottleneck—not just at the border but throughout our immigration system—is slowing down the flow of these vital workers.

Calls to action, strategy development, and multiple initiatives over the last decade have made clear how important it is to end preventable maternal and perinatal deaths. But we still don’t have a comprehensive understanding of how much saving these mothers and newborns, and preventing stillbirths will cost.

“The ICPD (International Conference on Population and Development) Programme of Action is a promise. A promise that was made 25 years ago to young people, the intention of which was to give young people hope—hope that their rights, their needs, and their demands would be met,” said Kobe Smith, Vice President of the Youth Advocacy Movement at International Planned Parenthood Federation/ Western Hemisphere Region, at a recent Wilson Center event. This year marks the 25th anniversary of ICPD in Cairo.

“We were all working mothers,” writes American journalist Megan Stack in her recent New Yorker piece about raising two children in India. The women who helped shape her thinking and cleared the way for her writing were migrants who left their own children behind to lovingly care for hers. “We spun webs of compromise and sacrifice and cash, and it all revolved around me—my work, my money, my imagined utopias of one-on-one fair trade that were never quite achieved,” she writes. 

“Saving Mothers, Giving Life has undeniably raised the bar in how we address maternal perinatal mortality,” said Dr. Florina Serbanescu, Team Lead of Global Reproductive Health Evidence for Action at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the launch of the Global Health: Science and Practice Supplement on Saving Mothers, Giving Life at a recent Wilson Center event. Saving Mothers, Giving Life (SMGL), is a public-private partnership created to reduce maternal and newborn mortality in sub-Saharan African countries. “The achievements show that what is often seen as an intractable problem,” said Serbanescu, “can be addressed with the right leadership, resources, and political will.”

With rapidly aging populations and rising levels of female employment, the United States and other wealthy nations are facing unprecedented demands for non-familial care. These nations vary in their ability to address such demands. Those with more robust welfare states, including publicly supported, high-quality child care and elder care services and facilities, are generally able to meet growing needs for care, while those with weaker welfare states experience severe “care deficits,” leaving families with few alternatives. Increasingly, in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, families are turning to migrants—usually women—to solve their care dilemmas.