Thank you.
Although we can't put a number on the impact of former President Bush's policies in this area, we do know that international funding for family planning services stagnated during that period, even though the need for family planning grew. As a result, there were almost certainly more unintended pregnancies, probably half of which ended in unsafe abortions. And the result of both unsafe abortions and unintended pregnancies would have been substantial in terms of the impact on maternal mortality.
As you all know, unsafe abortion is a very important component of maternal mortality worldwide. In those countries that have in fact addressed other contributors to maternal mortality, deaths related to unsafe abortion actually become an even larger share of maternal deaths.
So all of this was unfortunate. We lost a good deal of momentum in the effort to make reproductive health care universally available. I hope that we can now, with the change of government in the United States, make up for that lost time by making substantial new investments in family planning services around the world.