Like many women, I was genuinely excited to become a mother.  I also really enjoyed being pregnant. But after a perfect birth experience where I delivered my daughter exactly the way I dreamed, I suffered a complication that could have been fatal had I not received the care that was so easily accessible to me.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to travel with the humanitarian organization CARE to El Salvador – my mother’s birth country – while pregnant with my second child. Of the many CARE projects I visited, one in particular inspired me to focus on maternal health. This is when I learned that it had been estimated by the World Health Organization that more than 500,000 women die each year from pregnancy related causes—and that 90% of these deaths are preventable. Then in 2007, I visited another CARE project in Peru where maternal deaths were significantly reduced over a short period of time.

I came away from that trip with hope and felt certain that we, as a global community, could do better. That was the moment of inspiration from me to begin making the documentary film, NO WOMAN, NO CRY. I thought that if I could help to connect women with each other through the universal experience of pregnancy and childbirth, others might feel inspired. After two years of working on this project, I was very excited to share NO WOMAN, NO CRY at its world premiere on April the 24^th at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Christy Turlington Burns, Director, NO WOMAN, NO CRY

Christy Turlington Burns is the Maternal Health Advocate for CARE and a graduate student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.