On the eve of a Security Council debate on the role of women in peace and security, two senior United Nations officials have stressed the need to combat gender-based violence and to ensure that violations of women’s rights, including the use of rape as a weapon of war, are viewed as a security issue.

‘There has been an obvious weakening of the feeling that abortion is a last resort in cases of extreme danger or distress,’ Williams writes, noting that ‘nearly 200,000 abortions a year in England and Wales tell their own story’. Instead, the leader of the Church of England claims the growing belief that ‘abortion is essentially a matter of individual decision’ means it is no longer ‘the kind of major moral choice that should involve a sharing of perspective and judgment’.

Attaining Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 – one of several global anti-poverty and development targets agreed to by a UN summit in 2000 – requires an annual decline of 5.5 per cent in maternal mortality ratios between 1990 and 2015. But the current annual decline is less than 1 per cent, according to figures released by the UN World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Bank.

He noted that too many women die during pregnancy and childbirth because their right to sexual and reproductive health is denied; too many women become infected with HIV because they do not have the power to protect their own health; and too many women are subjected to violence – “one of the most systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world.”