Every day 830 women around the globe die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes. Almost all of these deaths occur in the developing world, but over the past sixty years this global problem has made waves at home. While worldwide maternal mortality rates are decreasing, the rates are rising in three countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, and the United States. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of women who died in the United States from pregnancy-related causes while pregnant or within 42 days postpartum increased by almost 27 percent, from 18.8 per 100,000 deaths in 2000 to 23.8 in 2014.

The voluntary use of family planning, among its many benefits, is good for sustaining the healthy ecosystems that support all wild plant and animal species. This should be common sense. If your mission is environmental conservation, you should want to help remove barriers to reproductive health services, so that all women can space wanted pregnancies and avoid unintended ones.

“We are all convinced that educational entertainment is the way to go now,” said Anselme Muzalia Wimye, Program Quality Director at Search for Common Ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He spoke at a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, Maternal Health Initiative, and The Population Institute. The panel discussed the power of educational entertainment (EE), in particular serial dramas, to precipitate positive behavioral change and public health outcomes in Africa. 

“We are stripping the life away from the blue planet,” said oceanographer, explorer, and author, Sylvia A. Earle. She keynoted a recent event on marine protected areas in Antarctica and the high seas co-hosted by the Wilson Center and The Pew Charitable Trusts with support from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. “Do we want a planet like Mars?” she said. “Most people would say, ‘I don’t think so. I like to breathe. I like water that falls magically out of the sky. I like having a living planet.’”

World population continues to grow. The latest UN projections, released this week, indicate that we will add another 2 billion people to the planet by 2050 and 3 billion by the end of the century.  While population growth is ebbing in many countries—and even starting to contract in a few—population growth in some countries remains brisk, if not breakneck. 

It’s disturbing to see the data going in the wrong direction and it means we have to go beyond what we’ve been doing, said Terri D. Wright, Vice President of Programs and Community at the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation at a recent event on equitable prenatal care in the United States hosted by The Jennifer Bush-Lawson Foundation and the American Medical Association at Duke University in DC. “We can’t do the same things the same way and expect a different outcome,” she said. “We’ve got to do something different.”