Louis MacNeice Quotes

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

I had a really scary pregnancy and a very difficult delivery. My daughter and I are lucky to be alive.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

After delivering my daughter in 2003, I endured and survived a hemorrhage, the leading childbirth-related complication that takes the lives of thousands of other mothers all over the world.

Every year, more than 1 million children are left motherless and vulnerable because of maternal deaths, and children who have lost their mothers are up to 10 times more likely to die prematurely than those who have not.

Every day we hear about the dangers of cancer, heart disease and AIDS. But how many of us realize that, in much of the world, the act of giving life to a child is still the biggest killer of women of child-bearing age?

My back is broken because of the last pregnancy.

I lost my spleen, I lost the hearing in my left ear, so I had a lot of internal organ damage.

My mom had an encounter with the KKK when she was, I think, 7 years old in North Carolina. She snuck into a cross burning. I'm so lucky she didn't get caught, because I wouldn't be here.

An emergency on the labour ward needs to be addressed within minutes or else lifelong disability or even death can follow for the baby or mother.

It makes no sense to spend precious resources on propping up loss-making, state-owned enterprises when they could be used to get more children into school or provide more midwives to reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth.

If the people in the emergency room didn't know my name, they definitely knew my face because I was in there, like, every other week. I was one of those kids.

In order to reverse the maternal health crisis for black women in the U.S., we need concrete policies from our leaders and better protocols from hospitals.

Fifteen years ago tomorrow I had open heart surgery, a quintuple bypass surgery. Thanks to all of my doctors. Because of them, in 15 years of life I've been able to experience, well, acid reflux, short-term memory loss, and erectile dysfunction. Thanks for all your work. It's great to be alive.

How's his appendix?""Like crap. They almost didn't catch it in time, and he's still doing the ass-plant in a hospital bed, beingdoted on by an army of hot nurses. Makes me sick.""Maybeyou should rupture something.""Any more of these stories out of you and I just might.

I think for my parents it was like "A Boy Named Sue," the Johnny Cash song. A guy named Sue tries to track down his father to take it out on his father for naming him Sue. And his father says, "Look, I knew I wasn't going to be around. So I gave you the name so that you would grow up strong enough to take the hits and fight back." So I like to believe that's why my parents gave me this stupid name.

In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant.

I did marry, I did get pregnant, but as I was giving birth, my daughter and I almost died. We were rushed to the hospital. I had an emergency cesarean and in that moment, in the emergency room, I felt my grandmother come to me. She was with me and when my daughter was born, instead of naming her Hailey, I named her Lucy after my grandmother. Hailey lives in the pages of my books.

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.

Each issue has to be looked at as to whether or not it threatens a woman's health or her life, and if it does, you can't support it. And if she just wants to have her legal right to an abortion, she should be able to do it.

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother's side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld's brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight.

I grew up in hospitals. My father was sick. So I grew up in hospitals from the age of 10. Got to see a lot of suffering.

A few years ago, when I was writing songs for my first album, I was staying with Michael Feinstein as I often did. I was working on a pilot. My grandma was very sick at the time. She died of complications from alcoholism. She always used to say [in his grandma's voice], "Red wine is good for my heart. That's what my doctor said." And we'd say, "Yeah, but not for breakfast." Unfortunately, it was the thing that killed her. I felt inspired to write a song about her and what that meant for her life and for all of us. I was writing it in Michael's house.

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above", I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.

certainly the women's health part is something that I've become very interested in. It's not something I thought about when George [Bush] was elected...what I'd always been interested in was education.