Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Adults worldwide can today look forward to a life-expectancy of 60 plus. But not young Pakistani women: they die like flies, daily, during childbirth...

South Carolina's lack of access to quality maternal health care is pervasive.

Every woman, whoever she is, wherever she lives, should be able to give birth without the fear she's going to lose her baby or that her baby will lose her mother.

We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman's side during childbirth.

The truth is women use contraception not only as a way to prevent unintended pregnancies, but also to improve their health and the health of their families. Increased access to contraception is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality.

There's a saying in Africa: 'To find out you are pregnant is to have one foot in the grave.'

When I gave birth to my fourth child, I suffered from post partum hemorrhaging. I almost lost my life. I was lucky to be under the care of trained health care personnel. I started wondering then what was happening to women in rural villages.

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

… men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this [childbirth] very often. God's will be done, and if He decrees that we are to have a great number of children, why we must try to bring them up as useful and exemplary members of society.

Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability.

The world is rich enought today that the idea of millions of children dying of disease is unacceptable. We have the resouurces and know how to prevent this.

A lot of people die giving birth to their children who have AIDS and HIV and a lot of people don't survive after a time because they've been sick too.

Women who are with child should be careful of themselves; they should take exercise and have a nourishing diet. The first of these prescriptions the legislator will easily carry into effect by requiring that they should take a walk daily to some temple, where they can worship the gods who preside over birth. Their minds, however, unlike their bodies, they ought to keep quiet, for the offspring derive their natures from their mothers as plants do from earth.

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.

Centuries ago it may have been difficult for pregnant women and their children to get proper nourishment, probably leading to smaller - and therefore shorter-lived - adults.

We should recognize that women become mothers the moment they are pregnant.

The U.N. Population Fund has a maternal health program in some Cameroon hospitals, but it doesn't operate in this region. It's difficult to expand, because President Bush has cut funding.

Dying in childbirth is something that's not new; it's been going on for ages, and so it's not something that people focus on; it's not something that gets funded a lot, and it's exactly for that reason that we are losing mothers all the time, and we have kids with no mothers.

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.

Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.

I wasn't scared of childbirth. I educated myself and did my fair share of research, and that made me feel a little more prepared.

Restricting access to such a basic health care service, which 99% of sexually experienced American women have used and 62% of American women are using right now, is out of touch with public sentiment.