Last April, Eless Limani set out on a long and costly bicycle ride to the Mponela Health Center to get a new supply of birth control pills, her usual contraceptive. The 32-year-old mother was not ready to have a second child.

While a great deal of focus on risks to women’s health just before and after giving birth centers on physical wellbeing, Rebecca Levine, Senior Maternal Health Advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), observed that we may be missing a key part of the picture.

For six years, the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Index has been a tool to hold the United States accountable to the commitments made nearly three decades ago at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, where 180 countries developed a human rights framework for global development that explicitly promoted SRHR for women and girls globally.

The 15^th anniversary of World Contraception Day (WCD) on September 26^th was a perfect moment to renew the commitment to increase awareness and knowledge about contraceptive methods. But the availability of safe and effective methods is not enough. Reproductive autonomy, which is defined as “having the power to decide about and control matters associated with contraceptive use, pregnancy, and childbearing,” is also a central tenet of both WCD and the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. People must be supported in making their own decisions about their sexual and reproductive health, including if and how they become pregnant.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching, negative impacts on health and well-being, particularly in population mental health. Mental health is strongly related to people’s social environment, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this greatly. Many countries instituted shutdowns early in the pandemic restricting people’s movement both within and between countries. Shutdowns socially isolated people from one another and often led to poor mental health. The highest rates of mental distress occurred during time periods when COVID-19 mitigation measures were strictest and the number of COVID-19 related deaths was highest.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

For many people, stillbirth— the occurrence of a fetal death at 20+ week’s gestation—is a concept. A statistic. Each year, at least 23,000 stillbirths occur in the United States. It occurs in one out of every 160 pregnancies. Yet when these numbers become a reality in your own life, they take on a new meaning.

“Globally women and girls continue to face barriers to access healthcare services—whether it be transport costs, financial costs, or even language barriers,” said Shakira Choonara, Technical Specialist with the World Health Organization (WHO) at a recent launch event of the Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Learning by Sharing Portal (LSP).