Film: No Woman, No Cry // Every Mother Counts

In her gripping directorial debut, Christy Turlington Burns shares the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.

Learn more about the film here, and join the effort to improve maternal health and reduce maternal mortality at Every Mother Counts.


"Like many women, I was excited to become a mother and enjoyed being pregnant. But just after delivering my first child, I suffered a serious complication. While I had a birth team that worked quickly to manage the situation, I was shocked to learn that more than 500,000 women die each year during childbirth—and that 90 percent of these deaths are preventable. This left me needing to learn more about maternal health.

I have since become the Maternal Health Advocate for the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) and enrolled in the Masters of Public Health program at Columbia University's Mailman School. But I still felt helpless, frustrated by the reports that maternal mortality numbers were not dropping. I was inspired to make a documentary film that would share the stories of women at risk of becoming a mortality statistic. I hope that by bringing people together through the universal experience of birth, we can help create a mainstream maternal health movement that ensures the lives and well-being of mothers worldwide, for generations to come."