The Film

In 2005, while pregnant with my second child, I traveled with the organization CARE to El Salvador—my mother's birth country. Of the many CARE projects I visited on that trip, there has been one in particular that has stayed with me and has inspired me to focus on maternal health. As part of CARE's water project, I visited a remote village where pregnant women and mothers of newborns had walked for miles to access clean water. For some, this was also their only opportunity to receive some form of antenatal and postnatal care. I returned home to New York City and gave birth to a healthy baby boy—a beautiful, uncomplicated delivery in the birthing center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. But I continued to think about those women I had met—young mothers who had so much to fear. As a result, I was inspired to learn more about maternal health in other impoverished parts of the world and was horrified by the tragic statistics I found.

In 2007, I traveled to Peru to visit a project that focused on reducing maternal mortality in the Ayacucho region. This project, The FEMME Project, is a partnership between CARE, Columbia University's Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) program, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Together, with the support of the local Peruvian government, The FEMME Project has reduced maternal mortality by almost 50 percent in less than five years.

I met some of the people on the frontlines, working together in response to an enormous unmet need, and I was given hope that projects such as this could be the solution. I set out to learn what other measures were being taken to reduce maternal mortality throughout the world. While I was disheartened to discover that the numbers were still abysmal, there had recently been a lot of attention and new momentum generated around this issue. So I decided to begin a documentary film to highlight what is being done and what more could be taken on, giving viewers an informative and powerful look at this compelling global issue without having to leave their ZIP code.