Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here and for what you do around the world.
Dr. Bhutta, I want to start with you. You talked about what we would certainly call barbaric practices: female genital mutilation, early and forced marriage, and so on. I think you said the FGMs are being carried out by medical professionals for the most part, or a lot of them are. You focused on the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East.
How much of that is culturally and religiously rooted? Can we ever change that, particularly on the religious side? Can we ever hope to change that? We may tap dance around this, but is there a religious determinant of health?