{"id":5319,"date":"2010-10-28T10:52:40","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T09:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=5319"},"modified":"2011-05-09T14:42:12","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T13:42:12","slug":"sally-carter-on-maternal-health-with-a-touch-of-glamour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2010\/10\/28\/sally-carter-on-maternal-health-with-a-touch-of-glamour\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Carter on maternal health – with a touch of glamour"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Eighteen months ago I had my first child, and ever since I’ve loved\u00a0listening to\u00a0other people’s birth stories – long, short, blissful, or terrifying – I’m all ears.\u00a0I got a ticket as soon as\u00a0I saw the London Film Festival was\u00a0showing No Woman, No Cry<\/em>, a\u00a060 minute documentary\u00a0about maternal health\u00a0directed by the model\u00a0Christy Turlington Burns. Did it help that that the film was short and Ms Turlington Burns would be taking part in a panel discussion afterwards? Absolutely –\u00a0an hour isn’t long\u00a0however harrowing the subject matter, and I’ve never seen a world famous model in the flesh.<\/p>\n

The film was introduced by Sarah Brown, global patron of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, and wife of the former UK prime minister, Gordon Brown.\u00a0After the screening a\u00a0panel, including Christy Turlington Burns and Anthony Costello, professor of international child\u00a0health at the UCL Institute of Child Health,\u00a0discussed the film and took questions from the audience.<\/p>\n

Christy Turlington Burns narrates the film throughout, and begins by\u00a0explaining the inspiration behind\u00a0the film –\u00a0and\u00a0presumably the campaign she set up www.EveryMotherCounts.org<\/a>, and her taking a Masters in public health at Columbia University’s Mailman School. After she gave birth to her first child she had a post-partum haemorrhage. Of course, she received excellent care and she and her daughter were fine. She also realised many mothers weren’t as privileged.<\/p>\n

The film has beautiful cinematography, a great sound track, interesting characters, and leaves\u00a0any gory details to your imagination. It follows\u00a0at risk pregnant women in\u00a0Tanzania and Bangladesh,\u00a0has a moving interview with a man in the US whose partner died from an amniotic fluid embolism when their son was born, and shows a doctor in Guatemala who works in public health.\u00a0Guatemala has\u00a0strict anti-abortion laws, and this doctor\u00a0highlighted how many women die from botched abortions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Each\u00a0story\u00a0is interspersed with\u00a0glimpses of Turlington Burns’ seemingly charmed life in New York, although she visits a clinic for women with no health insurance in Florida to show\u00a0that it’s not just developing countries where economic disparity exists.<\/p>\n

The film doesn’t answer any questions, but it gives you a lot to think about. It makes clear that many women around the world can’t access quality maternity care\u00a0for several reasons: lack of money, being too far away from healthcare, and because of social, cultural and religious barriers. Perhaps we knew these things already, but the film was a powerful way of of driving the message home.<\/p>\n

You can view\u00a0No Woman, No Cry\u00a0on www.brightwide.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Oh, and Christy Turlington Burns, yes, she was incredibly beautiful in real life.<\/p>\n

Sally Carter<\/strong> is a technical editor, BMJ<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eighteen months ago I had my first child, and ever since I’ve loved\u00a0listening to\u00a0other people’s birth stories – long, short, blissful, or terrifying – I’m all ears.\u00a0I got a ticket as soon as\u00a0I saw the London Film Festival was\u00a0showing No Woman, No Cry, a\u00a060 minute documentary\u00a0about maternal health\u00a0directed by the model\u00a0Christy Turlington Burns. Did it […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,2275],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editors-at-large","category-sally-carter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}