If one is talking to a finance minister of a poor country, moral arguments tend not to get very far. But if you can argue that their country is going to grow 2 percent faster per year if they can just harness the power of the female half of the population more effectively, that is an argument they consider.

The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings.

The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible.

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

More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there.