For Immediate Release
PHR joins other NGOs in urging President Bush to assert bold and thoughtful leadership when nations convene at the UN in September 2008, to chart a course to accelerate action on the Millenium Development Goals. The MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases, but without "urgent and concerted action” by all nations, the MDGs will not be achieved by the target date of 2015.
The NGOs urge Pres. Bush to give special consideration to the steps that are yet to be taken within the United States and globally to save the lives of millions of women who die needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth each decade, almost always for lack of the amount and quality of care taken for granted by all but the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. An important contributing factor in that lack of care is the dearth of trained and available health workers such as professional midwives. The NGOs further request that Pres. Bush represent these concerns and raise the appeal that all nations move from pledges and promises to decisions and actions which will sustain tangible results.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. Learn more here.