A Horror Film about Childbirth

In aiming to spotlight infant and maternal mortality rates worldwide, Christy Turlington Burns's No Woman No Cry relies on fear instead of facts.

You could say I'm passionate about birth. I delivered both my children without medication (the second was a water birth) and am trained as a doula. While I'm aware that situations arise that require intervention, even surgery, to keep mother and baby safe, I'm unconvinced that our nation's high cesarean rate is justified, and I think there are plenty of reasons to actively promote more midwife-attended births, even home births. I'm grateful that for most U.S. women, highly skilled medical help is just around the corner, ready to step in should something go wrong. But I also believe that birth is safe.

Yet for lots of women in the world, birth isn't so safe. It's not just that high-tech help isn't around the corner. It's the whole nexus of social, cultural, and economic reasons that make birth a riskier prospect. It's that girls get married and pregnant too young. It's that they haven't been nourished during their growing years or pregnancies. It's that they hold hospitals and non-traditional birth attendants in suspicion. The result? A woman dies from a preventable pregnancy or childbirth complication about every two minutes

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