Read the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 29-city survey on hunger and homelessness in 2011.

Read a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, which found that 14.9 percent of the nation’s households did not have enough food for at least some time in 2011.

Vicki Saporta is executive director of the National Abortion Federation in Washington, D.C., the professional association for abortion providers in North America.

Jon O’Brien is president of Catholics for Choice, which believes that the individual conscience should be the keystone for moral decision-making on reproductive rights matters and that affordable contraception should be available to all.

Debra Ness is president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Washington D.C., that works to promote quality health care for women, including access to abortion. Contact communications assistant Cindy Romero.

Neil Howe is a historian and economist who writes about generational issues. He is co-author, with William Strauss, of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (Vintage, 2000).  Howe and Strauss say Millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s, are optimistic, positive and engaged – they want to make a difference.

Frederick Edie, a United Methodist minister, is assistant professor of the practice of Christian education at Duke Divinity School. He also directed the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, which invites high school students to live for two weeks in an intentional Christian community at Duke.

Chris Boyatzis is a developmental psychologist who teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. He has studied religious and spiritual development in families, including how teenagers talk to their parents about religion. He’s also worked in an area he calls “God in the Bod,” looking at how young people’s spirituality affects their body image and […]

A BBC article on Islam explains that abortion is generally forbidden by the religion, but is acceptable if having the baby will put the mother’s life in danger.