br With respect to the welfare of children and mothers

With respect to the welfare of children and mothers, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is sometimes perceived as risky. The relevant MDGs had a focus on interventions to address maternal and child health, while the focus of the SDGs is expanded to “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”. This transition raises two concerns: a broader set of priorities might dilute the attention on maternal and child health, and the broader priorities of the SDGs require the use of more complex implementation instruments than those used in the past. A Countdown to 2015 case study in Peru by Luis Huicho and colleagues published in might provide findings that help countries transition to the SDGs. Peru had huge success improving health outcomes during the Countdown years to 2015. Peru was ranked first globally among 75 low-income and middle-income countries in the reduction in neonatal mortality and second in the reduction of under-5 mortality; stunting prevalence was cut in half; and equity in health-care use and in health outcomes improved significantly. Huicho and colleagues carefully examined the determinants of this success in their study, concluding that many stars were aligned: Peru enjoyed a caspase pathway of unusually rapid economic growth which coincided with a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, and with the modernisation of the anti-poverty programmes; long-term trends in the education level of mothers, total fertility rate, and urbanisation were also favourable. All of this led to a striking reduction in poverty which fell from 55% of the population in 2001 to 23% by 2014 and provided a fertile ground for the stellar improvement in health outcomes.
Thanks to the leadership of Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abe, universal health coverage (UHC) is on the agenda of the G7 Summit. The achievement of UHC will contribute to increased global health security by tackling much of the world\'s ill health and associated poverty. As the G7 Summit approaches, it is time to consider what it will take to get to UHC by 2030. In our increasingly globalised world, the fabric of global health security rests on resilient communities. Everywhere, whether in remote villages or crowded cities, resilient communities are ultimately made up of people who enjoy their basic human rights: to live in dignity, free from fear and free from want. UHC is a cornerstone of these rights and the right to health, with protection against financial hardship at its heart. This is why UHC must be more than a technical exercise. UHC is, and must be, about realising rights and redistributing opportunity. And, as such, gastrin is inherently political—it is about addressing entrenched power structures and tackling disempowerment, marginalisation, and exclusion. The backbone of our achievements in the AIDS response has been our commitment to maintain the focus on the rights of every individual. We chose not to look the other way as we were told to, whether in the name of sovereignty or culture, or because of powerful private-sector interests. We must do the same for UHC: remain grounded in the paradigm shift at the end of World War 2 that brought the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the right to health. This commitment to cover everyone, including those outside of the salaried workforce and the very poor, began a new era of increased reliance on government revenue to finance UHC (eg, Japan in 1961 and the UK in 1948).
The past three decades brought important developments to the area of women\'s access to abortion, especially with the advent of medical abortion methods. However, the rate of unsafe abortion worldwide remained unchanged between 1995 and 2008. Although abortion was legalised in India in 1972, several barriers continue to prevent women from accessing safe abortion services, especially in rural areas. They include skewed distribution of urban and rural abortion facilities, high costs, and provider barriers including denial of choice between medical and surgical methods and insistence on husband\'s consent.