No Woman, No Cry

I’m so very pleased to have Christy Turlington Burns today on the blog. I wrote about her amazing advocacy for women’s and maternal health a few weeks back – and I truly admire how much she’s done to change the world with her foundation, Every Mother Counts, proving that the old adage about beauty on the outside is great, but beauty on the inside is what really counts. And it’s so, so true in Christy’s case. Equally admirable: she hasn’t rested on her laurels; she’s instead opted to return to school to get her Master’s degree, and keeps pushing herself to shift her life in challenging directions. What a great example for her two kids who she’s busy raising in NYC with her husband, Ed Burns.

After years of dominating the mommy blogger field, which she helped to create in the first place, Heather Armstrong’s latest head-turning project was a journey to Bangladesh with supermodel Christy Turlington to tour the slums depicted in Turlington’s documentary, “No Woman, No Cry.” In a feature on She Posts last week I wrote about Armstrong’s trip, and on Friday I spoke with her by phone. Having been back for a few weeks, she’d had time to get a little perspective, and boy did the blogosphere provide a sharp contrast to the experiences she had while abroad.

Raising kids can certainly be a struggle—but birthing them may truly be the biggest struggle of all. Worldwide, one woman dies every 90 seconds from pregnancy and childbirth complications; 90% of those deaths are preventable. And perhaps shockingly, women in the U.S. are far from immune to this epidemic (we rank 50th worldwide for maternal mortality according to the latest UN report), despite our skyrocketing spending on healthcare. To bring attention to this crisis in women’s health, Christy Turlington Burns, mother of two, activist, women’s health advocate, and fashion icon, has produced and directed her first film, the incredibly moving documentary “No Woman, No Cry” (which follows pregnant women in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala and the U.S.) and created Every Mother Counts, a five-year outreach campaign dedicated to improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality around the world.

It’s tough to make a film about access to emergency obstetric care without rubbing against the home birth community just a little bit. When I speak about my experience of becoming a mom for the first time and wanting a home birth, it’s important to know why. I was afraid of hospitals for a number of reasons. The first being that my dad died in a hospital fourteen years ago and then a month later, I was invited by my sister to attend her second child's birth. After her baby was born, I witnessed my niece being swept away from her mother for no apparent reason. My sister's first birth had been induced and on this occasion, despite there hardly being any time for drugs, she was "hell bent" on having them.