For more than a half million women each year, pregnancy is a death sentence. Every minute another mother dies from a complication in pregnancy or childbirth. Shockingly, nearly all maternal deaths and disabilities could be prevented. No Woman, No Cry is a gripping documentary that tells the powerful personal stories of pregnant women and their caregivers in four countries as they try to avoid becoming one of these troubling statistics.

Drawn into the issue by her own experiences as a mother, Christy Turlington Burns sets out to see firsthand what can be done to prevent so many women from dying. Turlington Burns has created a moving and visually rich documentary that personalizes the quiet crisis of maternal mortality, putting audiences in the shoes of a young Maasai mother who has gone into labor and must walk five miles to the nearest clinic; a pregnant woman in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh who is too ashamed to seek care; and a pregnant obstetrician helping women who have had no choice but to undergo dangerous illegal abortions in Guatemala. Turlington Burns exposes how even the United States, a country that spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, still has a higher maternal mortality ratio than all of Western Europe as well as Bosnia, Kuwait, Slovenia, and Hungary. Turlington Burns has made an eye-opening activist film that will touch mothers and non-mothers alike.

Christy Turlington Burns and Christy Turlington Burns