Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, the Rockefeller Foundation recently published this report. It is called High Stakes: The United States Global Population and Our Common Future. It is important that we consider what the stakes are in this debate because the stakes are indeed high. Mr. Chairman, the stakes are about women dying. They are about mothers dying. Every day 1,600 women die of pregnancy-related causes because they do not have access to reproductive health services, including family planning. Around the world, 250 women will die for lack of family planning services during the course of this debate; 585,000 women die for these reasons every year around the world. What they die of is called most frequently postpartum hemorrhage. It happens most frequently when poor women have undergone many closely spaced births, and when these women die, they die because when they have their pregnancies they are too young, they are too old, their children come too closely together or they have too many children, and when they die they leave behind vulnerable orphans. It is indeed a tragedy. The stakes are about children dying.”