A recent article by Malcolm Potts, Aafreen Mahmood, and Alisha Graves of the University of California Berkeley’s OASIS Initiative notes that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency. “The pill is mightier than the sword,” as they put it.

Maternal mortality causes 56,000 deaths every year in India, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths around the world. Women who are born into the lower castes or are tribals – India’s indigenous groups – are especially likely to lack access to quality health care. Over 40 percent of these women also belong to the lowest wealth quintile.

The feats that pregnant women perform under some of the most rudimentary conditions are sometimes unimaginable.

The Global Maternal Newborn Health Conference, held in Mexico City from October 18-21, will provide a forum to identify, understand, and respond to the most urgent health needs of mothers and newborns. The hope is that it will accelerate momentum for maternal and newborn health in the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals and put us on a track to end all preventable maternal and newborn deaths.

For all its flaws, the United Nations remains the only plausible forum for engaging broad global challenges like sustainable development. The most important environmental achievements of the past 40 years – the rise of environmental awareness, the birth of key ideas such as sustainability or the common heritage of humanity and the most important global treaties for environmental protection – all bear the UN stamp in one way or another. We could have added environmental human rights to that legacy last month, but we failed.

In the long term, improving maternal and child health is as critical to national security as any problem in Pakistan today, said a panel of experts including Minister of National Health Services Saira Afzal Tarar at the Wilson Center on September 9.

Yesterday was International Youth Day, and governments, donors, and public health professionals are paying more attention to the unique needs of the world’s young people and the importance of their civic engagement and participation. Unfortunately, most young people do not have access to basic sexual and reproductive health care and information. This not only undermines their health and wellbeing, but significantly affects their abilities to stay in school and participate in their communities.

The World Economic Forum recently named water crisis the world’s number one risk for the next 10 years for its potential impact on people and industry. Indeed, as the global community grapples with climate change – and environmental change of all kinds – understanding the fundamental nature if water to human society is crucial. The input report for this year’s World Water Week, released yesterday by the Stockholm International Water Institute, in fact argues that getting water management right is a prerequisite for sustainable development.