This post originally appeared as part of a series produced by The Huffington Post [6] and the NGO alliance InterAction [7] around the United Nations General Assembly's 68th session and its general debate on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  

Thirty years ago, I was a young physician practicing family medicine in rural Talihina, Oklahoma. We saw unusual cases, including snakebites and a man who survived a gunshot through the heart. But what I loved most was delivering babies – bringing new lives into the world and great joy to parents. Sadly, my most vivid memory from those years is of a baby girl who didn’t make it. Her parents, first-time pregnant, didn’t recognize the warning signs. When they reached the hospital, our team was too slow.  Too late.

Last month, I joined over 1,800 participants from more than 100 countries in Beijing at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research [10]. We've made some concrete steps forward since we last met in Montreux, Switzerland, two years ago, among them the launch of a new research society Health Systems Global [11]. Central topics of this year's discussions included: “Inclusion and Innovation towards Universal Health Coverage” (UHC), the symposium theme, and monitoring and evaluation.

On this historic World Population Day --- the first with the world’s population at seven billion and growing --- we call your attention to a crucial summit in London happening today, and to the ongoing importance of supporting access to family planning and sexual and reproductive health.

The London Summit

Over one hundred high-level decision-makers are convening at The London Summit on Family Planning [16] in hopes of securing a better future for women and girls globally. Hosted by the UK government [17] and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [18], with UNFPA [19] and others, the summit seeks to provide an additional 120 million women in resource-poor countries with lifesaving contraceptives, information and family planning services by 2020.

On Monday, March 5, 2012, everyone from policymakers to students gathered at the World Bank for a Special Event on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and Women’s Rights.

CEDAW [24] is a treaty that has been ratified worldwide by all but six countries --- the United States, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and two small Pacific Island nations (Palau and Tonga).

The event was hosted by Caroline Anstey, Managing Director of the World Bank [25], in conjunction with the Nordic Trust Fund, The Leadership Conference Education Fund, and the United Nations Foundation [26].

[29]A team of experts from WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and World Bank recently published a report on maternal mortality entitled “Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2008 [30]" (PDF).

The document reports some fantastic news about a public health indicator that has until recently refused to budge. That indicator is the maternal mortality ratio, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The improvement between 1990 and 2008 is significant and promising.

The part of the report that received much less coverage relates to HIV and its strong, adverse effect on maternal mortality. The authors estimate that in 2008 there were 42,000 deaths due to HIV & AIDS among pregnant women and approximately half of those were maternal deaths. In absence of HIV we would have had 337,000 maternal deaths in 2008 instead of 358,000.