The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.

Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

Usually people are very much focused on keeping their kids alive.

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

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

For most of history, genocide was just something governments did and nobody blinked.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.