The Medical Women's International Association December Update is now available - click here to read the news and activities from medical women around the globe.

Despite progress, health system shortfalls and gender discrimination are severely impacting women’s health worldwide, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report Women and Health: Today’s Evidence, Tomorrow’s Agenda.

The report examines both women’s health needs and their contribution to the health of societies. Using current data, the report takes stock of what we know now about the health of women throughout their lives and across the different regions of the world. Click here to download the report and find out why women's health is an urgent priority for WHO.

A doubled investment in family planning and pregnancy-related care could reduce maternal deaths by 70 percent and newborn deaths by 50 percent worldwide, according to a report released by the Guttmacher Institute and UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

The report, Adding It Up: The Costs and Benefits of Investing in Family Planning and Maternal and Newborn Health, documents the benefits of meeting the need for both family planning and services for mothers and newborns. According to the study, investments in family planning boost the overall effectiveness of every dollar spent on providing pregnancy-related and newborn health care. Simultaneously, investing in both family planning and maternal and newborn services, rather than just in services to mothers and newborns, could achieve the same dramatic outcomes for $1.5 billion less. Taking this action would prevent the deaths of nearly 400,000 women and 1.6 million infants every year; unintended pregnancies would decline by more than two-thirds; and unsafe abortions and resulting complications would both drop by about 75%, the report said. To read more please click here.

How do population dynamics affect greenhouse gases and climate change? Will urbanization and an ageing population help or hinder efforts to adapt to a warming world? And could better reproductive health care and improved relations between women and men make a difference in the fight against climate change? Find the answers in the UNFPA's State of World Population 2009.

Click the link above to download the SWP report, or click here to read more at the UNFPA website.

AFMW congratulates Dr Hamlin on receiving The Right Livelihood Award (the Alternate Nobel Prize) "for her fifty years dedicated to treating obstetric fistula patients, thereby restoring the health, hope and dignity of thousands of Africa’s poorest women". Dr Hamlin, who is the first Australian woman to receive this prestigious international award, received the award in the Swedish Parliament on December 4, 2009.

Dr Catherine Hamlin was born in Sydney in January 1924. In 1959, she left Australia together with her husband Reginald in response to an advertisement to work as obstetrician/gynaecologist at a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The couple was horrified by the prevalence of obstetric fistula, a condition arising from prolonged obstructed labour that leaves the affected woman incontinent of urine, with 20% suffering bowel incontinence as well. Permanently leaking bodily fluids, they often become social outcasts, without hope, and live in the most miserable conditions. Obstetric fistula, formerly common throughout the world, is now almost non-existent in industrialized countries, thanks to better obstetric care, but is still prevalent in developing countries.