These Indigenous Women Are Saving Lives One Birth at a Time
Every two minutes, a woman dies of complications related to pregnancy or childbirth—that’s about 720 deaths every day. But 98 percent of those are preventable.
“We’re not exactly waiting for a cure,” says Christy Turlington Burns, a model, filmmaker, and entrepreneur who advocates for global maternal health. In 2010, she founded the nonprofit Every Mother Counts; it has since invested $4 million in grants to maternal health organizations in seven countries around the world. (See Nat Geo photographers' favorite photos of their moms.)
Burns’s advocacy work began with No Woman No Cry, a documentary on global maternal health filmed while completing a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University. “Con Madre,” a new documentary shared above, focuses on
