Michelle Obama Quotes

In large part, thanks to widespread immunization, the number of young children dying each year has declined significantly, from approximately 14 million in 1979 to slightly less than eight million in 2010.

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...

Child marriage and pregnancy … is the biggest cause of teenage female deaths in the world.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

One of the biggest development issues in the world is the education of girls. In the United States and Europe, it has been accepted, but not in Africa and the developing countries.

Yesterday in this country we had people die of hunger and malnutrition. In some parts of this country, the infant mortality rate rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa. We have a public education system that ranks below that of almost any other Western nation.

We can't end poverty if we fail to save the lives of our world's mothers.

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

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

When a woman has her first child in places like Africa, they're really young. They can be 12, 13,14, so their frames are really small, and they're usually malnourished.

We're all in denial from time to time. We all see things that are too painful to really deal with. But this has consequences, and the consequences of not vaccinating your children are not only just that those children are exposed to illnesses; it's that everyone else they go to school with and they hang around with are, too.

Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development - it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor - it's all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility.

My father was a civil servant in northern India where I was born. As a boy I saw the dire effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially on women and children. It often seemed that the only thing separating me from them was luck.

Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.

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.

Textile making is our basic domestic industry. Machine-produced fabrics take away our women’s work and harm their livelihood.

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.

Denying the rights of women and girls is not only wrong in itself; it has a serious social and economic impact that holds us all back.

Antiabortion rules disproportionately harm women of color and low-income women of every ethnicity, affecting their economic capacity and threatening their very lives.

My friends, they get married at 15 years old. I saw them with bruises on their faces. I realized this is the real face of child marriage.

Improved maternal health benefits the whole of society.

Every second minute, a woman or a girl dies in the world due to pregnancy.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

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.

The Millennium Development Goals can be met by 2015, but only if all involved break with business as usual and dramatically accelerate and scale up action now.