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These are the common stories of today. They are stories of unimaginable suffering. The stories, of course, will be inadequately told, for anyone who has not experienced what is meant by maternal mortality and morbidity can know the suffering endured. Those who do know are usually silenced by their early deaths, by their poverty, by their gender, by their believed inferiority and by the insulating layers of censorship and embarrassment that still surrounds the issues of sex, blood and birth in most societies of the world, especially those third-world countries governed by Islamic law. In Punjab, Pakistan this past summer, Ms. Mukhtaran Bibi, an 18-year old woman, was sentenced to gang rape by the village council in southern Pakistan. Four men violently dragged her into a hut and painfully raped her while a large group of other men watched. Primarily, she was asked to appear before the informal village council to apologize for the alleged misdemeanor of her younger 12-year old brother. He was accused of having an illicit affair with an older woman from another tribe of higher status. After Ms. Bibi’s public apology to the council for her brother’s alleged affair she was sentenced to gang rape while the fellow villagers w