For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy.
Interpretation
Early motherhood poses significant health risks for both young mothers and their infants.
Esther Duflo highlights the critical issue of adolescent motherhood, emphasizing the dangers that come with young girls giving birth too early. This phenomenon not only endangers the health of the young mothers, who face increased risks of mortality and health complications, but also adversely affects their children, who are statistically more likely to suffer from high infant mortality rates. The quote brings attention to the broader implications of early motherhood on societal health and wellbeing.
In practice
In a speech addressing youth empowerment, one could say, 'As Esther Duflo pointed out, for millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early,' to emphasize the importance of education.
And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.
The poor get bored the same as the rest of us. Their happiness might be as important to them as their health.
In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?
Part of me always wanted to do something useful for the world. It came from my mother. She is a paediatrician and she was active in a small NGO for the child victims of war.
Family life got better and we got our car back - as soon as we put 'I love Mom' on the license plate.
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.
I've never felt like I was in my mother's shadow. If anything, I felt like I was in her embrace.
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.