For many people, stillbirth— the occurrence of a fetal death at 20+ week’s gestation—is a concept. A statistic. Each year, at least 23,000 stillbirths occur in the United States. It occurs in one out of every 160 pregnancies. Yet when these numbers become a reality in your own life, they take on a new meaning.

COVID-19 continues to pose a high risk to pregnant people who contract the virus. Despite this concern, hesitancy surrounding the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy remains, write the authors of a preprint article on COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy outcomes. As COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available, some have raised concerns regarding potential links between receiving a COVID-19 vaccine and experiencing miscarriage (also known as spontaneous abortion), and other adverse outcomes. However, miscarriage is a common occurrence – around 10 to 15 percent of all pregnancies in the United States end in miscarriage – and multiple studies have found no increase in miscarriage in persons who received a COVID-19 vaccine.

Since 1987, the number of women dying during pregnancy and delivery has dropped by 43 percent, saving hundreds of thousands of women’s lives—and changing the lives of their families—around the world. “Our achievement in making maternal mortality an injustice that needs to be recognized by health ministers, by heads of state, by heads of agencies, has been, I think, the single greatest achievement of the Safe Motherhood Initiative” since it began 30 years ago, said Ann Starrs, President and CEO of Guttmacher Institute, at a Wilson Center event marking the anniversary of this important effort.

The intersection of reproductive health and climate change is an understudied nexus in academic literature. In her Nature article, “Considering Climate in Studies of Fertility and Reproductive Health in Poor Countries,” Kathryn Grace looks at how studies of contemporary fertility transitions are better served when they include the impacts of climate change.

Urbanization is changing the face of poverty and marginalization, and the maternal and newborn health field needs to change too, said a panel of experts at the Wilson Center on January 24.

Last October, on the heels of the UN General Assembly agreeing to the Sustainable Development Goals, the global health community met in Mexico City to discuss strategy for achieving the “grand convergence”: finally bridging the gap between maternal and newborn health in rich and poor countries. [Video Below]