Thank you very much. I am very happy to see you again, dear colleagues. I had left you some time ago.
Good afternoon, ladies. I will try to be brief so that you can do full justice to my question in your answers.
It is said that we have barely made any progress on goal 5, which is to improve maternal health. Actually, the goal is to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters. The deadline for achieving the goals is 2015. There is very little time left for attaining this goal, among others. That seems to me to be virtually impossible. Do you think it is a realistic goal?
To succeed, we have to have all the necessary tools. We should not give some up at the expense of others. If we accept the figures you gave us today, almost 13% of maternal mortality—the estimated number varies from 350,000 to over 500,000—are the result of unsafe abortions performed by quacks. Those women chose to do it because they had so many children that they could no longer feed them. So they reached a dead-end and had a decision to make.
How can we reach the goal of reducing the number by three quarters if we do not give them all the necessary tools?