“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is spearheading a quiet revolution in progressive foreign policy by making the empowerment of women and advancement of their rights a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy,” Peter Juul, a policy analyst at American Progress, writes in a post on the American Progress National Security Strategy…

This report from the Kaiser Family Foundation assesses how countries are responding to a GHI principle to address women, girls and gender equality.

In another installment in NPR’s summer-long series “Beginnings,” NPR’s All Things Considered aired a story on Wednesday examining how the controversial drug misoprostol is being used worldwide to save women’s lives.

Mara Hvistendahl, a correspondent with Science magazine and author of the recently published “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” writes in a Foreign Policy feature that “as American politicians argue over whether to cut Planned Parenthood’s U.S. funding and the Christian right drives through bans on sex-selective abortion at the state level, the effects of three decades of sex selection elsewhere in the world are becoming alarmingly apparent. In China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, the first generation shaped by sex selection has grown up, and men are scrambling to find women, yielding the ugly sideblows of increased sex trafficking and bride buying.”

GlobalPost on Sunday published two articles examining family planning and maternal mortality in Malawi.

“Gender biased sex selection, widespread in many parts of Asia, has serious and profoundly debilitating effects on the mental and physical health of women, says a report by five United Nations agencies,” BMJ reports.

“The time of neglecting malaria in pregnancy (MIP) should be over,” Bill Brieger, senior malaria specialist at JHPIEGO, writes in a Malaria Matters blog post summarizing a session on malaria and maternal health at the recently concluded Global Health Council annual conference. He adds that “moving forward, strengthened monitoring and surveillance is needed to fine tune, revise and better target MIP interventions to make a bigger impact on reducing maternal mortality in endemic countries” (6/18).

“According to a United Nations Population Fund study released Monday, more and better trained midwives could help save millions of lives in” 58 countries “identified as ‘suffering from a crisis in human resources for health,'” the Associated Press/Washington Post reports.

In a post on State’s “DipNote” blog, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby describes accompanying Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on her trip to Africa.

“A vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, triggered by the human papillomavirus (HPV), has helped reduce the number of teenage girls developing abnormalities in their cervix by as much as 50 percent in a study in Australia,” according to a report published Friday in the Lancet, Reuters reports.