Just in time for Mother’s Day and the 50th anniversary of the pill, model-turned-filmmaker and mother of two Christy Turlington Burns debuted No Woman, No Cry at the Tribeca Film Festival. She financed the film out of her own pocket after discovering that 500,000 women die from childbirth every year.
“I did it — not because I had the ambition to be a filmmaker — but because I had the resources to do it and I felt like I was able to see some experiences that women were dealing with,” Turlington Burns tells Tonic. “I felt it was important for the rest of the world to see it, and that film was the best medium.”
As a student in the Masters of Public Health program at Columbia University’s Mailman School, Turlington Burns had the statistics in front of her:
- Ninety percent of pregnancy- and childbirth complication-related deaths are preventable.
- The United States ranks 41st globally in maternal health, even though it spends the most on health care per capita.
- More than 200 million women do not have access to modern contraceptives.
- Half of the women in the world give birth without a doctor present.
She called her friend, movie producer Dallas Brennan Rexer, and after they reviewed these facts, they agreed No Woman, No Cry had to be made. The duo teamed up with organizations such as CARE, BRAC, the White Ribbon Alliance and Planned Parenthood to find subjects who had stories to tell. The documentary follows four women and one man in their journeys of procreation. It begins with Janet (pictured below), a woman in Tanzania who needs a C-section but is too poor to pay for a $30 van ride to a hospital. In a move uncommon with many documentary filmmakers, Turlington Burns steps in and loans her the money.
“Christy was very clear from the beginning that we’re there to help,” Brennan Rexer said. “We had no desire to stand by and film something devastating happening to anybody. That wasn’t our purpose. But we also wanted to share the reality of what happens when we’re not there … so it was hard…. We knew that we were going to leave and ultimately the best thing that we could do to help these women was carry their stories back to everybody else, so you could be part of the change.”
While no effort has been made in Tanzania to provide cheap transportation to pregnant women in rural areas, Planned Parenthood’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean Dee Redwine told Tonic that the Guatemalan legislature is moving to pass a law that will mandate transportation for emergency obstetrical care.
“Sixty plus percent of the population lives in rural areas,” Redwine said. “There is something being done with that. That’s the good news.”
The crew then traveled to the urban slums of Bangladesh, a country run rampant with rumors that doctors steal babies from their mothers. That’s why 80 percent of pregnant women in the capital city of Dhaka give birth at home without a skilled attendant. The film followed nurses in BRAC’s Manoshi Research Project, who visit expecting mothers, encouraging them to seek medical help when their time comes. When one Bangladeshi woman went into labor, she was too ashamed to ask for help and waited until it was almost too late to get a pedicab to the hospital across the river. At the medical center, she ended up giving birth to a healthy baby boy — that the doctor did not steal.
But the film did not only focus on developing nations. Turlington Burns shared her own story (she did not want to give birth in a hospital at first) as well as the tales of the thousands of pregnant women in the US without health care.
“One of the saddest things about women getting their care through the ER in their pregnancy is unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of judgment that goes with that care. Doctors and nurses judge from the angle of ‘Well, you don’t care about your baby or you’d get prenatal care,’” Jennie Joseph, midwife and executive director at the Birth Place/Commonsense Childbirth in Florida, says in the documentary. “Again that comes back to that place where there’s a lack of understanding on their part on how you get prenatal care and how difficult it is to get prenatal care. Most of the women present [in] our ER are not wantonly trying to get prenatal care. They have just had it and can’t get their foot in anybody’s door.”
Working to open that door, Turlington Burns started EveryMotherCounts.org to educate women and lobby world governments to provide greater care for pregnant women. The crew is taking the film to the G8 Summit in Canada this June. You can even spread the world by sending your mother a Mother’s Day e-card today.
Photo courtesy of EveryMotherCounts, photo by Dallas Brennan Rexer via EveryMotherCounts, photo courtesy of EveryMotherCounts.
