Women Top Priority For UN Goals

World leaders are getting together next week to discuss global poverty, education, and health. The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are eight international development goals agreed upon by UN members.

The one farthest from its target is number five: to reduce the number of women who die in pregnancy and childbirth and increase access to family planning.

The UK deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, says that women and children should be a top priority. He has committed to doubling the number of women and children helped by UK aid by 2015. His goal “is at least 50,000 more women and 250,000 babies will survive and 10 million more couples will get access to family planning.”

Clegg has wisely stated that “women are often the heart of the family and without healthy mothers, families, communities, and societies fail.”

I hope they get some solid plans out of these meetings. So often there is a lot of talk and no action, but this is definitely a time where we need action.

Everyday living and our busy lives often make us forget that women and children who don’t live in Western countries still  need a lot of help. While we are complaining about getting equal pay at work, they don’t have access to midwives, clean water, food, every act of sex has the prospect of killing them through pregnancy and birth, and in some places have to deal with the real prospect of rape on a daily basis.

Every now and then we should take a moment to remember our fellow women and feminists in the rest of the world, and this is that moment.