About half as many women worldwide die from pregnancy, childbirth and related complications compared with two decades ago, according to United Nations estimates released Wednesday.

The declining numbers of maternal deaths -- from 543,000 in 1990 to 287,000 worldwide as of two years ago -- were cheered by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and the World Bank, which jointly issued the report.

But a global goal of reducing maternal deaths by 75% from 1990 to 2015 remains distant in some countries where progress has been slow or nonexistent.

Read the full article here

By The Los Angeles Times, 05/16/2012

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that's mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it's not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There's a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That's why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution. Read the full article here.

By The New York Times, 08/17/2009