Last week, Time published “The Perils of Pregnancy: One Woman’s Tale of Dying to Give Birth,” a poignant photo essay and article on the grim reality of women dying in childbirth in Sierra Leone. I read the piece with mixed emotions. The images, the tone of the Time article contrasted sharply with everything I heard last week during Women Deliver 2010 conference: family planning use is increasing, child survival is improving, and there have been steady declines in the number of women dying from pregnancy-related causes, according to a recent Lancet article.

What a pleasure for IntraHealth to be able to host Rwanda’s Ambassador to the US, His Excellency James Kimonyo, at our headquarters offices here in North Carolina last week!

The Africa Exchange Meeting of the Expanding Services Delivery Project (ESD) held last week in Nairobi offered opportunities for learning about promising inroads in increasing access to reproductive health and family planning.

Maternal mortality has always been one of the most difficult indications of progress to measure.

I just returned from Bangkok, Thailand where over 400 professionals representing 13 countries in the Asia and Middle East Region came together to wrestle with the complex issue of scaling up family planning and maternal and child health best practices.

As the final plenary session ended in Uganda last week, I felt a sense of excitement. Exhaustion, yes, but also this urge to stand up and shout…let’s do something, anything, to make the dream of ready access to family planning services world over a reality.