Women‘s health month 2026 finds me thinking about three women I have never met but cannot stop thinking about. One is in Lagos, navigating a pregnancy in a country the BBC this year declared the most dangerous place on earth to give birth.
One is in Manila, trying to access contraception in a country where the Catholic church and the state have spent decades making that access difficult enough to cost lives.
One is in Bogotá, one of 750,000 Colombian women who want to avoid pregnancy but are using no contraceptive method at all, not because they do not want to, but because the system has not reached them. Three women. Three cities. One women’s health month 2026 question that none of their governments have yet answered satisfactorily: why is staying well still this hard?
I became a doctor because I believed medicine could close the gap between what a woman’s body needs and what the world offers it. I am still waiting for that belief to be fully vindicated.
In Lagos, Safe Childbirth Is Not a Given. It Is a Negotiation.
Women’s health month 2026 cannot be told honestly without starting in Lagos. In April 2025, the BBC published an investigation that labelled Nigeria the most dangerous country for childbirth, based on maternal and neonatal mortality data. Nigeria accounts for nearly twenty percent of global maternal deaths despite having approximately one percent of the world’s population.
The maternal mortality ratio sits at 917 deaths per 100,000 live births, which translates to roughly 40,000 pregnancy-related deaths every year, and a lifetime risk of one in twenty-two for a Nigerian woman dying from pregnancy-related causes.
Those are not statistics. They are women. They are the woman who arrives at a facility in labour and finds no skilled attendant. The woman whose referral is delayed because the ambulance did not come and the road was not passable. The woman who had the danger signs but waited too long because the nearest facility she trusted was too far, and the nearest one she could reach she did not trust. Community listening across multiple Nigerian states in 2025 found that communities consistently attributed maternal deaths to poor access to quality facilities, shortages of skilled health workers, weak referral systems, and long distances to care.
The 2025 Gender in Nigeria report revealed that 71.2 percent of married women lacked autonomy in making sexual and reproductive health decisions, limiting their ability to make informed choices about their bodies and futures. That figure sits alongside the mortality data and reframes women’s health month 2026 as something more than an awareness campaign. It is an indictment of a system that has consistently failed to treat women’s bodies as deserving of the same urgency as everything else.
There are people working against this. The MamaCare360 programme, run by Wellbeing Foundation Africa, places digital midwives directly inside communities in Lagos, conducting home visits and providing continuity of care for women who would otherwise have none. The Nigerian government introduced a free emergency caesarean section policy in late 2024, aimed at poor and vulnerable women at high risk of dying due to lack of access to surgical obstetric care.
These are real, meaningful interventions. They are also insufficient at the scale of the problem, and they are occurring inside a funding environment that became significantly more precarious in early 2025 when US foreign aid was suspended, threatening programmes that millions of Nigerian women depended on.
In Manila, Reproductive Rights Are a Legal Battle That Women Are Still Fighting With Their Bodies
Women’s health month 2026 in Manila arrives inside a complicated legal and cultural landscape. In April 2026, the Philippines expanded maternity benefits under PhilHealth, a national health insurance scheme, with the policy applying across both public and private facilities and expected to reduce or eliminate out-of-pocket expenses for women giving birth. This is a genuine step forward. It is worth naming clearly before the full picture is drawn, because the full picture in women’s health month 2026 requires honesty about what the expansion sits alongside.
Contraceptive use in the Philippines stands at 59 percent for married women, substantially below the 77 percent global average and the 87 percent rate for East and Southeast Asia. Abortion remains entirely illegal under all circumstances in the Philippines, one of the very few countries in the world that maintains an absolute ban. Restrictive abortion laws result in dangerous procedures that kill hundreds of Filipino women each year, with an estimated 27 out of every 1,000 Filipino women of reproductive age having had an abortion. They are having abortions. The law does not stop the abortions. It stops the safety.
The story of reproductive rights in the Philippines is inseparable from the story of institutional power. A 2008 investigation into Manila’s ban on modern contraceptives from local health centres prompted the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women to investigate violations of women’s reproductive rights. That was 2008.
The structural barriers that prompted that investigation have not been fully dismantled in the years since. Women’s health month 2026 in Manila is a story about a country that has passed the right laws and not yet fully lived by them, where the distance between a right on paper and a reality in a woman’s body remains, for too many women, the distance between life and serious harm.
In Bogotá, the Numbers Are an Argument the Government Has Not Yet Won
Women’s health month 2026 in Colombia centres on a Guttmacher Institute study published just days before this piece was written. The study found that Colombia could reduce maternal deaths by 55 percent, unsafe abortions by 43 percent, and unintended pregnancies by 43 percent if it fully met the sexual and reproductive health needs of women and girls. For adolescents specifically, full access to modern contraception would reduce maternal deaths by 57 percent. Colombia is not being asked to invent new medicine. It is being asked to fund what already exists and what already works.
The study estimates that 1.2 million women between 15 and 49 in Colombia want to avoid pregnancy but are not using modern contraception. Of them, 517,000 rely on traditional methods, and 750,000 use no contraceptive method at all. These are not women who are indifferent to their own health. They are women the system has not reached. The distinction is the entire point of women’s health month 2026.
Colombia has made genuine legal progress on reproductive rights. The constitutional court decriminalised abortion in 2022, a landmark decision that placed the country ahead of many of its regional peers. The challenge, as with the Philippines, is the gap between legal change and practical access, the clinic that does not have the medication, the provider who refuses on conscience grounds, the woman in a rural community for whom the urban policy change has not yet arrived.
Intimate partner violence affects one in three women globally and in Colombia, and research from 2022 to 2025 on Bogotá’s support systems for women at risk found persistent limitations in how the health and justice systems coordinate to protect them. Women’s health month 2026 in Bogotá is a story about a city and a country trying to become something better, inside systems that are still catching up with the ambition.
What Women’s Health Month 2026 Is Actually Asking Of All Of Us
Women’s health month 2026 is not a month for pink infographics and self-care reminders. It is a month to look directly at what the evidence says about what women need and what the world is providing, and to name the gap between those two things in language that does not soften the edges.
The gap is structural. Women in low and middle income countries face maternal mortality rates that are not the product of biological inevitability but of system failure, of underfunded clinics, of absent skilled attendants, of referral chains that break at the critical moment. Women everywhere face reproductive health systems shaped around the preferences of institutions rather than the needs of bodies. Women in the highest-burden communities face the compounding disadvantage of poverty, distance, cultural pressure, and a healthcare architecture that was not built for them and has not yet been adequately rebuilt.
What makes things better is not complicated in its elements. Community health workers who reach women before crisis. Contraceptive access that does not require a political battle to obtain. Maternal care facilities that are staffed, equipped, and close enough to use. Funding that is protected from geopolitical weather. Legal frameworks that treat women’s reproductive autonomy as a right rather than a concession. And health systems that ask, before they design anything, whether the woman who needs this service most can actually reach it.
Women’s health month 2026 belongs to the woman in Lagos managing a pregnancy in the most dangerous country in the world for childbirth, and who deserves better than a statistic. It belongs to the woman in Manila who needed contraception and was handed a law instead. It belongs to the 750,000 women in Colombia who want to plan their families and are waiting for a system that takes that want seriously. Their health is not a campaign. It is a debt the world has been slow to pay.
Women’s health encompasses far more than reproductive care. If you have concerns about any aspect of your physical or reproductive health, please speak with a qualified healthcare professional. Every woman deserves access to timely, respectful, and evidence-based care.
