This week, Congress begins debate on a new budget. I met the women who, with the smallest amount of encouragement, have started the Women's Dairy Cooperative and taken over the local milk business. I saw their community center's computer, that any village woman, poor or nearly illiterate, can use to get the latest information on caring for a newborn child. Think about how life in that one village is changing for the better because women have access to education and health care. Hillary and I have seen, again and again around the world, in the smallest, poorest rural villages on every continent, how empowering women lifts the lives of individuals and transforms the future of communities.
Family planning is a vital part of that empowerment.
It allows women and families to make their own choices and plan their own futures. Around the world, the complications of pregnancy kill about 600,000 women every year. If you're in favor of healthy mothers raising healthy babies, you ought to be in favor of family planning. And in the developing world, almost half of them are women. Last year, AIDS killed 1.1 million women, leaving broken communities, crippled economies and millions of orphaned children.