The Honorable Mary Robinson gives opening remarks at the global leaders council for reproductive health in New York, NY. (Dominic Chavez/Courtesy)

As originally seen at the Global Post.

NEW YORK CITY – At a forum at the Rubin Art Museum earlier this week, a group of global leaders, including two top US officials, talked about how reproductive health issues for women were wrongly cast as only a women’s issue.

Instead, they said reproductive health was intimately connected to the world’s population boom, climate change, water and sanitation crises, economic downturns, educational rates, and development overall. And greater reproductive health rights would trigger a brighter future for the 600 million young women in the developing world, including the 10 million girls who are married before they reach the age 18, said the panelists, members of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health of Aspen Global Health and Development.

And yet, reproductive health and family planning is generally not a focus on the world stage. In fact, the topic is often avoided.

“If you can help young women feel empowered, where they themselves want to delay pregnancy, they can become the actors in their own lives,” Maria Otero, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs said at the Rubin Museum of Art. “What this Council allows us to do is think about the issue of reproductive health, one that is interconnected to all other issues” related to development.

Jan Eliasson, former president of the UN General Assembly and former foreign minister of Sweden, told a crowd of 200 people at the Rubin Museum of Art of a trip he took to the Darfur region of Sudan two years ago and found village wells poisoned, forcing women to walk for 50 minutes to collect impure water.

“The kids all had gray skin, and here the women were walking 50 minute to get dirty water, bringing it back to kids who were dying,” he said. “These women are the ones not getting educated, they are the ones dying in child birth, because there is no clean water. The point I make is that whatever we do, we have to realize we all interconnected. Here is a water and sanitation issue, and here also is a reproductive health issue.”

Finish reading the story at Global Post.