There has been a lot of media attention around the dangers of drugs used to treat mental illness on the fetus.

Giving birth was probably the most empowering thing I've ever done physically. I was like, 'Now I can do anything. I can run a marathon... I can run three marathons!'

Like so many new moms, I felt anxiety over the impending birth of my daughter. However, most of the anxiety I felt was around the idea of raising a child. I wasn't focused on potential risks to my health or hers that could occur during the actual birth.

In some countries, as many as 91 percent of women have no one at their side to assist them during labor and delivery.

There are disparities in accessing quality maternity health care in most every country, and most all health systems could and must be improved upon if we want to create healthy families who will thrive.

Access to maternal healthcare is a human right.

I never looked at magazines before I started modeling. I was 13 or 14, and none of my friends were into magazines. We were into the fashion of the day, though.

There have been so many photographers and editors who mentored me over the years. At the very beginning, the person who taught me the most was Arthur Elgort. I always loved working with him. We traveled a lot together.

I always recognized that modeling would allow me to see and do a lot, so I looked for opportunities to learn and grow.

I never thought I would model for more than a few years.

I have a very heavy-footed walk; I always have.

In my teen years, I was hanging out with adults - Steven Meisel, Francois Nars, Oribe, Paul Cavaco. We had so much fun! We'd go out in New York.

I'm not a morning person.

I feel like being a good model for my children is something that I do take seriously.

Mothers need mothers. Let's be there for one another.

In many countries, women aren't jubilant when they learn they are pregnant. Quite the opposite - they're terrified.

I have good skin, but it's dry - drier than you would think, considering I have Latin skin. It's fairly transparent, too, so I'm constantly trying to give it nourishment and moisture, but nothing really holds.

You know, all these sentiments about beauty coming from within, they've always resonated when I've read them, but it takes a bit of living to truly appreciate them. To realise we are so much more than our experiences, that we are who we are because of the lessons we've learnt, now that's what true 'beauty' is for me.

When I was 18, and my looks were what I was - and all that I was - it did feel very limiting.

I remember doing a shoot for Herb Ritts, hanging off the Eiffel Tower - that wasn't your usual day at the office. It was terrifying, and in the end, you couldn't really tell how high I was because the photographer was scared of heights, so he was quite far away from me.

Getting older is baggage for so many people but I don't spend time on things I can't control. Wrinkles don't scare me; they're a part of life, and I will and do embrace them, but I look at surgery, and that scares me.

Fashion is all about references. All these names being thrown around.

I was a regular kid with a normal family life.

I almost had to exhaust myself at modeling before I could say, 'O.K., I'm ready for school.'

Yoga has been the best tool for managing stress and life's challenges. Everything from my studies to my father's death was eased by my practice of it.

I haven't left modeling completely; I just took a step out, and I now have the rare luxury of picking and choosing how to spend my days.

I was really gangly and uncoordinated as a kid. I couldn't even do a cartwheel.

Walking strengthens my legs, and I swing my arms to tone my upper body.

On average, African-American women are 4 times as likely to die from pregnancy related complications. Latina women are at 2 times greater risk.

America's health care system is the most complicated and expensive in the world.

When 1970s feminism hit the United States, women demanded the right to natural childbirth and to have their husband or another support person in the delivery room. My mother gave birth to me during this time.

May is the month when people focus on mothers more than any other time of year.

Even though Haitian women are considered the 'poto mitan' - the 'central pillars' of the family and their communities - they are often the most underserved members of already poor communities.

We're living in miraculous times where connections are made at the blink of an eye, the tap of a thumb, and the click of a mouse. We can never replace human interaction, but these simple actions can be powerful and meaningful to those we connect with.

In parts of the world where basic infrastructures like paved roads and transportation systems are underdeveloped, people walk for days to reach a health care provider.

In the world of maternal health, cell phone technology is being used to provide prenatal care, linking pregnant women to health care providers when they can't otherwise reach healthcare facilities.

This globalization is lifting up hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The Left needs to see that.

Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.

It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

Thanks to globalization and the technology revolution, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from that work, and maybe even the economic cycle itself are being transformed.

This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

Corporations are not employment agencies, and judging them by that metric is a mistake.

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

Defending human rights should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive players like China and Russia.

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.