Status of Women committee  One of the things that I meant to say earlier in response to an earlier question was that the single best indicator of a functioning health system is maternal mortality. The better the health system, the lower maternal mortality is. So in terms of accountability, that is one of t

Status of Women committee  I think it's important to put on the table the fact that two-thirds of the investment that's now being made in family planning and maternal and newborn health is being made by people in the developing countries, their governments, and private organizations, as well as individual

Status of Women committee  Are you referring to the vaccine initiative, or something else?

Status of Women committee  No, we're recipients of funding in the contraceptive technology area, not the vaccine initiative.

Status of Women committee  Yes, you did. One of the reasons we are so focused on maternal and newborn health is that those are two areas where we haven't made much progress compared to the progress we've made on other millennium development goals. Prior to the global recession, there was very substantial

Status of Women committee  It's not only the woman who suffers as a result of the complications of unsafe abortion; it's her entire household. We have just done some work attempting to estimate the social and economic costs of unsafe abortion in countries like Uganda, Rwanda, and other parts of the devel

Status of Women committee  The first question was, what do we mean by an “unintended pregnancy”? This is a technical definition. It is what women themselves say about a recent pregnancy, that it either was unwanted or that it occurred two or more years earlier than they wanted. Health risks in pregnancy a

Status of Women committee  During its first week in office, the Obama administration rescinded the Mexico City policy, which denied U.S. foreign aid to any foreign organization that with its own funds, including funds from its own government, provided any type of abortion counselling or services. The 199

Status of Women committee  Certainly we've got to provide a whole range of services to the women who've been victimized in that way. Access to safe abortion for those who wish to terminate the resulting pregnancies seems to me to be a basic humanitarian response. But these women need more than safe abortio

Status of Women committee  I have nothing to add on that last question.

Status of Women committee  I think we need to focus on where there is agreement. Family planning is not controversial. Although I would love to see leadership from Canada on the issue of reproductive rights and access to safe abortion, certainly we can agree that behind every abortion is an unintended preg

Status of Women committee  I'll be very quick. I would love to see the Canadian government double its current level of investment in both family planning and maternal and newborn health. We're not talking about a lot of money, as Robert said. But more than that, I'd really like to see the Canadian gove

Status of Women committee  Thank you. Although we can't put a number on the impact of former President Bush's policies in this area, we do know that international funding for family planning services stagnated during that period, even though the need for family planning grew. As a result, there were almos

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to appear today. Let me dive right in. If we could convince the world community, developing as well as donor country governments, to double current investments in both family planning and maternal newborn health, we could reduce maternal mo