The Mother’s Day Every Day Campaign (led by the White Ribbon Alliance and CARE), and the Huffington Post continue their “Mother’s Day Every Day for Healthier Families, Communities and Nations” blog series this week with a post by Amb. Mark Dybul, and a post by Sarah Brown.

Excerpts from Mark Dybul’s post, full piece here:

Some of us in the United States might be preparing to celebrate Mother’s Day with a backyard party and are worried about pesky mosquitoes after rains across the country. We should consider ourselves lucky to view mosquitoes as pests: in much of the world, mosquitoes cause malaria and malaria causes around 500 million illnesses and more than 1 million deaths each year.

Malaria is particularly devastating in Africa, where it kills a child every 30 seconds — several by the time you finish reading this posting. Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable because pregnancy reduces a woman’s immunity to malaria, making her more susceptible to infection and increasing the risk of illness, severe anemia and death. For the child, maternal malaria increases the risk of stillbirth, premature delivery and low birth weight. And 80 percent of malaria deaths are among children under 5. Malaria is a major cause of maternal and child death.

Excerpts from Sarah Brown’s post, full piece here:

I’m starting to see more and more discussion on the blogs and in women’s magazines about third wave feminism. It’s like those of us lucky enough to benefit from our mother’s efforts to urge and discover greater freedoms for women are suddenly all thinking ’so now what?’

For me, the discussions of new feminism give us a chance to talk about one of the great insights of the old sort: that women without economic power in the end tend to be denied social, political and personal power too. So if we seriously want our century to be a women’s one, we need to think about what injustices remain for women in the developing world.

I listened recently to the group of African First Ladies gathered together for a health summit in the US and watched them work out how to build their programs and figure out how to put maternal health at the heart of what they do. They recognized readily that this is the keystone to addressing everything else. At some point we must change how we measure our existing work – our programs for international development, for education for all, for combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and polio, for economic empowerment and cultural change. We need to know how well we are doing on maternal mortality, or we won’t know how well we are doing in bringing real justice.

-Margaret McDonnell