Christy Turlington's documentary on maternal mortality

[bananas]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2010/oct/23/christy-turlington-maternal-mortality-film

Christy Turlington's first documentary film opens with alarming footage of the former model just after she has given birth to her first child, Grace, now seven. Her husband, the actor and film-maker Ed Burns, had filmed his daughter being born, but when Turlington started to haemorrhage, he kept the camera rolling: bloodstained sheets and thighs, a palpable sense of growing panic. It is an alarming introduction to the film's subject of maternal mortality: the stark difference between the care Turlington gets in her New York City hospital, and of the hundreds of thousands of women around the world every year who aren't so lucky. "I never planned to put any of myself in it," she says over a pot of Earl Grey in Clarke's, a fashionable restaurant in west London (her choice). "I was going to narrate it. Hopefully people will take my journey with me and people won't be thinking, 'Why her?'"

Turlington has just arrived from New York, here for the London film festival and today's British premiere of her film, No Woman, No Cry, which follows the stories of women in Tanzania, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and women without healthcare in America. She has long had the reputation as the nicest of the supermodels and I'm glad to find she seems unaffected, her face a wonder of perfectly proportioned planes and bare of makeup, and dressed in flats, black sweater and slim cropped trousers.

About 350,000 women are reported to die because of complications – the vast majority preventable – in pregnancy and childbirth each year, though estimates put the figure far higher. About 99% of the deaths in 2008 were in developing countries, with half of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Reducing the rates of maternal mortality became a key topic at the UN summit to review development goals last month, with the aim of reducing rates by three-quarters by 2015.

Turlington's 60-minute film doesn't offer answers; she wanted it to raise awareness. "I wanted people to feel first, and not be telling them what they should think. I felt my role was to get people engaged and then take them to the next level, which is what I'm working on now with the Every Mother Counts campaign."

<snip>

[Mnemosyne]

1. My daughter hemorrhaged badly in 2001 giving birth to my grandson.

It seemed the blood would never stop gushing, the doctor was covered. I thank heaven each day she had a doctor there to save her.

A very important OP, bananas! Thanks! KnR!

[Sal Minella]

2. The "Forced Childbearing" people overlook entirely that gestation

and birthing can be hazardous enterprises without adequate medical support.

How wonderful it would be if all women were allowed to control timing of their pregnancies and could have adequate care during births.

[Odin2005]

3. before 1900 a large % of women died in childbirth.

Back in the middle ages many men were on their 2nd or 3rd or even 4th wife when they died. Why? The previous ones died giving birth.