Fifty years ago, it was hard for women to obtain contraception and relatively easy to die giving birth. Many women were unable to decide whom and when to marry, and when or whether to have children. A worldwide movement to give women real choices in life culminated in the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), where a consensus was reached about the links between women’s empowerment, sex...

UNITED NATIONS, New York, 10 April 2019— The global reproductive rights movement that began in the 1960s transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of women, empowering them to govern their own bodies and shape their...

The year 2018 was another challenging period for millions of women and girls whose lives have been upended by conflict, hazards, pandemics and displacement. A staggering 136 million people needed aid, an estimated 34 million of whom were women of reproductive age; 5 million of those women were pregnant.