As the result of a three-year effort, the Dutch initiative "Mother's Night" will take place in Hungary on May 15^th, 2011. This is a special event of the three-year international project Save Women's Lives, in which Dutch, German, Hungarian and Maltese partners intend to jointly draw society's attention to the protection of maternal health.

Mother's Day is a day of joy that many people celebrate with their families. Mother's Night draws attention to the drawbacks and tragedies of motherhood. This is important not only because we cannot passively watch the suffering of others, but also because the consequences make life more difficult for us all.

For example, in poor countries, maternal mortality rates are hundreds of times higher than in Europe. And approximately one million infants die every year because their parents could not wait 9 months after a previous birth before conceiving again. As a result, the mother's body has no time to recover.

Almost half of all couples have inadvertently made the decision to have children because of a lack of competence, means of preventing procreation, and rights to family planning. The Earth is becoming overloaded with more and more undesired conceptions, leading to population growth, which is a major cause of poverty, violence, and environmental degradation. In addition, tens of millions of children are worse off today because they were fated to be born to parents that did not plan ahead and were not ready to have a child.

The UN Millennium Summit (September 2000): Countries’ political leaders set out to achieve eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015. It was agreed to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. Of the eight goals, the fifth is aimed at the protection of maternal health and making family planning opportunities available to all.

The world's women have the right - before, during, and after pregnancy– to make decisions about their bodies and to quality health. The appropriate knowledge and competence in family planning tools effectively help to avoid the pressures leading to abortion. Thus, a vicious cycle can be changed into a positive cycle: when girls go to school, there are fewer teenage pregnancies, and fewer girls have to drop out.

Mother’s Night is a Saturday evening program about carefully planned, prepared and safe motherhood. It will include film viewings, roundtable conversations, discussions about the problems of everyday life and our children’s future and their connections with a lack of women’s rights and poverty, a lack of education competency in family planning, and availability of family planning options at home and especially in poor countries.