Photographs are still being taken but aren't being shown. There's one of a skeleton bound at the wrists with pants still around its ankles; if it was a woman, she was likely raped; if it was a man, he was possibly castrated.

The way you get leaders to care about issues of conscience is to apply political pressure. It's less a question of persuading leaders directly and more trying to build a social movement that holds their feet to the fire.

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

We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we've treated the Arab world as just an oil field.

I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight

When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.

...Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.