A comprehensive approach to women’s health: lessons from the Mexican health reform

The first part sets the context by examining the growing complexity that characterizes the global health field, where women’s needs occupy center stage. Part two briefly describes a critical conceptual evolution, i.e. from maternal to reproductive to women’s health. In the third and last section, the novel “women and health” (W&H) approach and its translation into policies and programs in the context of a structural health reform in Mexico is discussed. W&H simultaneously focuses on women’s health needs and women’s critical roles as both formal and informal providers of health care, and the links between these two dimensions.The most important message of this paper is that broad changes in health systems offer the opportunity to address women’s health needs through innovative approaches focused on promoting gender equality and empowering women as drivers of change.Despite important global progress, women’s health and, in particular, sexual and reproductive health, are still very much a part of the unfinished agenda. Indeed, girls and women face health challenges that have not yet been fully addressed. In fact, millions of women lack access to basic life-saving services and hundreds of thousands of women suffer death or disability every year from preventable diseases and complications of pregnancy. Every two minutes a woman unnecessarily dies of preventable pregnancy-related complications, [1] leaving behind impoverished orphans, struggling families, and devastated communities. Around the world, 200 million adolescent girls and women do not have access to safe and effective contraception —the fundamental tool for controlling their reproductive lives. Females still struggle with unwanted pregnancy, maternal morbidity and mortality, unsafe abortion, and reproductive cancers.Along with the biological risks, women and girls are affected by gender and other social inequalities, which are the underlying conditions for pervasive problems such as gender-based violence and th