Addressing Maternal Health Disparities and Driving Change

Can you describe some of the specific efforts Organon is undertaking to invest in research, education, and its pipeline to focus on critical areas of need in maternal health?

We're taking a global approach and working with partners around the globe to really reduce significant gaps in women's health needs, which include contraception and maternal health, but is not limited to just that space. One of the reasons is that we realize that we need to make sure that women are healthy throughout the whole continuum, for the reasons that we spoke about earlier when we think about the area of reproduction, now, one of our key focus areas has been unplanned pregnancies.

This is really a global public health crisis that impacts up to 50% of the pregnancies and improving access to reproductive care for women and girls, we recently launched a program called her plan. Is her power. It's an initiative that aims to reduce unplanned pregnancies and empower women and girls when it comes to their reproductive health.

We've dedicated $30 million in funding over three years and have committed to preventing 120 million unplanned pregnancies by 2030 in the US. We're collaborating with Direct Relief and their and power to decide to provide grants and contraceptive product donations to clinics and high need areas. And with direct relief as an example, they have more than. 4000 clinics across the US, along with power to decide, we're supporting a student reproductive health ambassador program at five historical black colleges and universities, and we're investing in these conditions which have been woefully underfunded and underappreciated for too long, such as postpartum hemorrhage, which is one of the most common complications affecting childbirth up to 14 million women each year.

Globally, postpartum hemorrhage is a potentially life threatening obstetrical emergency that requires real, timely intervention. And yet progress has lacked in this space, and we need to make progress in this area to improve birth outcomes for mothers and their children. We're also focused on addressing gaps in research and development, including how we design clinical trials, placing them in a way where women and can participate more robustly, and putting the perspectives of the patients, and particularly the women that are in these trials at our core need. What do I mean by that is really creating trials that are customized to be accessible, to be more readily available and to be fundamentally more empowering for women to not only participate in the trial, but to take knowledge of being in the trial into their homes and into their communities afterwards.