Christy Turlington's Maternal Health 'No Woman No Cry'

Christy Turlington and husband Ed Burns at Metropolitan Museum Costume Exhibit gala May 5, 2008Melinda Gates announced last week that the Gates foundation will invest $1.5 billion over the next five years to support maternal and child health, family planning and nutrition programs in developing. Most experts in the field agree that the deaths are preventable. 

Calling the initiative “her personal priority”, Melinda Gates says she plans to meet with leaders from donor nations, encouraging them to increase spending on child and maternal health. When the mother dies, the chances that her baby will not survive the first two years of life increases dramatically. 

Statistically, development experts agree that women are far more likely than men to invest available resources on their children’s education and welfare. When mothers are killed or left debilitated by childbirth, cycles of poverty and misery are particularly harsh for girl babies and young girls in the family. 

Christy Turlington’s ‘No Woman No Cry’

Christy Turlington Burns with fellow panelists at a CARE briefing, June 16, 2010, in Washington, D.C. (Amanda Lucidon for CARE)“

I didn’t want it to feel like an advocacy film,” says Christy Turlington about her documentary “No Woman No Cry”, which also made its debut at last week’s conference on reproductive health. “I didn’t want it to feel like an advocacy film,” Turlington says, “I wanted it to be an advocacy tool.” That means “No Woman No Cry” is almost wholly free of development speak and policy recommendations. via The Daily Beast

All who know her understand that Christy Turlington Burns is an activist first and a supermodel second. Turlington may have just signed up for the A/W Louis Vuitton campaign, but her focus is sharing 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.

“No Women No Cry” Trailer

Christy Turlington spoke last September 2009 with DoSomething.org about her interest in maternal health and service generally. 

Christy Turlington, Important Dinner for Women 2009

The movie leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions as they’re thrust into the kind of real-life situations that health-care workers in poor countries see every day. Turlington also makes crucial connections between the plight of poor women abroad and at home; in the United States, as she shows, pregnant women without health insurance can have as much difficulty accessing care as those in the third world.

The activist was in Ottawa on Thursday to show her documentary on maternal health and mortality at a private screening for Canada’s MPs.

“Canada has taken an amazing leadership position by having maternal and child health on the agenda for the G8,” she said, thrilled to hear that Canada was willing to put about $1 billion toward maternal and child health in the hopes other G8 countries would make similar pledges.

Turlington was diplomatic concerning the federal government’s position that funding should not go to groups or projects that encourage access to safe abortions. However, she said the data on maternal health — which shows that about 13 per cent of maternal deaths worldwide are linked to botched illegal abortions — is hard to ignore. via CBC Canada

“This billion dollars could be spent very well, and if we’re interested in saving lives, we’re talking about doing whatever we can do to prevent unnecessary deaths,” she said.

“It’s important that a comprehensive package is what is offered.”