Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former Washington Post reporter Leon Dash spent a year living in one of the poorest ghettos in Washington, D.C., and a total of seventeen months conducting interviews examining the causes and effects of the ever-lowering age of teenage parents among poor black youths. Dash had expected to find inadequate sex education and lack of birth control to be the root cause of the growing trend toward early motherhood, but his conversations with the mothers themselves revealed the truth to be more complex. A riveting account of the human stories behind the statistics, When Children Want Children allows readers to hear the voices of young adults struggling with poverty and parenthood and gets to the heart of teenage parents' cultural values and motivations.

There are more than 50 million children orphaned on the continent of Africa. To put this in perspective, as one of our witnesses today, Shimwaayi Muntemba, has pointed out, the orphans of Africa, if grouped together in a single country, would be the fourth-largest country in all of Africa after Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The factors contributing to this crisis are varied, starting with civil war and civil unrest, which have displaced millions, wars that have led to the deaths of parents and other adult relatives, leaving children to fend for themselves, or sometimes children who are separated from their parents in a mad flight for sanctuary, never learning if their moms or dads are alive or dead. Other children are indirect victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has wreaked such devastating havoc on the continent, or other diseases. As with many of the humanitarian crises that confront the continent, there is a big-picture aspect, which we as Congress need to address. There are important strategic implications of so many children and adolescents left without moms or dads.

By 2010, there will be 25 million AIDS orphans. Left alone, they will be ripe candidates for radicalization and exploitation by dictators and terrorists, and civilization will deteriorate to an unrecognizable point. Each chapter provides links to organizations that are working on solutions to this problem.