In an empowering speech on Friday, January 8, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated her commitment to women’s rights as human rights. Exactly 15 years since the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development was held in Cairo, Secretary Clinton praised the progress made in improving the health and lives of women and children around the world since this groundbreaking gathering.

This progress has included a marked increase in the use of modern contraceptives from less than 10% in the 1960s to 43% today; an encouraging increase in child survival rates; and an increase in female enrollment in schools. Despite this progress, Secretary Clinton rightly emphasized the crucial need for a continued commitment toward reaching the Conference’s goals by the target year, 2015.

Secretary Clinton cited alarming statistics: half the women in the developing world deliver their babies without access to crucial medical care and 215 million women worldwide lack access to modern forms of contraception – as Clinton put it, the “numbers are not only grim, but after 15 years, they are intolerable.” Vast gendered inequities remain; and women continue to represent the majority of the world’s “poor, unhealthy, and under-fed.”

Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration’s recognition that investing in women is “the smartest investment to be made…” shows that they’re on the right track. Earlier this year, President Obama and Secretary Clinton demonstrated their support for these issues by appointing Melanne Verveer as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.  The creation of this position sends a strong message to the world that the United States, in its deliberations on foreign policy and foreign aid, will give top priority to issues that affect women. Ambassador Verveer has since been a strong advocate on behalf of women around the world.  In October, she testified before Congress in hearings in both the House of Representatives and the Senate on violence against women.

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In an interview in next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Secretary of State Clinton says:

When it comes to our global health agenda, maternal health is now part of the Obama administration’s outreach. … Women die every minute from poor maternal health care. You know, H.I.V./AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria — those are all, unfortunately, equal-opportunity killers. Maternal health is a woman’s issue; it’s a family issue; it’s a child issue. And for the United States to say to countries that have very high maternal mortality rates, “We care about the future of your children, and in order to do that, we care about the present of your women,” is a powerful statement.

Maternal health is also a human rights issue, as Secretary Clinton acknowledged in another recent interview, with The Wall Street Journal:

… It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.

In the human rights framework, one of the key articulations of the right to maternal health is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which says:

States Parties shall ensure to women appropriate services in connection with pregnancy, confinement and the post-natal period, granting free services where necessary, as well as adequate nutrition during pregnancy and lactation. (Article 12)

But the United States hasn’t ratified CEDAW (the only other countries that aren’t States Parties are Iran, Nauru, Palau, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, and Tonga).

So it’s encouraging that the Clinton State Department supports CEDAW ratification, putting the ball in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s court (here’s a helpful recent primer on the state of play).

Given Secretary Clinton’s endorsement of the full range of economic, social and cultural rights (in her Wall Street Journal interview, she also mentions the rights to decent work, housing and education), her State Department should also support ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights — which, like CEDAW (and the Convention on the Rights of the Child), the United States has signed but not ratified. But CEDAW is the only human rights treaty on State’s recommended-action list. It’s up to the human rights community to push for ratification of all three treaties in the years to come.