Christy Turlington has stepped behind the camera to make her debut as a director with a powerful documentary highlighting the stories of at-risk pregnant women around the world.
The former supermodel, who is married to actor Edward Burns, explores pregnancy and birth in her film No Woman, No Cry, which features the plight of females in Tanzania, a Bangladesh slum, and a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala.
But Turlington fears viewers will be most shocked by her revelations about the United States' post-natal healthcare system, which has a Maternal Mortality Rate (Mmr) of one in 4,800 compared to one in 11,000 in Canada and one in 8,200 in the United Kingdom, according to figures posted on her Everymothercounts.org website.
Turlington tells Fox news, "There are a lot of surprising things in the films; I think most audiences, even internationally, are surprised about the statistics of the U.S. for maternal health. When I've shown it in England or Africa, a lot of those countries imagine the U.S would be at the top because we spend so much more money on healthcare than any other country, so that's quite shocking."
The former catwalk beauty suffered a potentially life-threatening postpartum haemorrhage (Pph) following the birth of her first child, and Turlington admits the scare drove her to find out more about the subject of post-natal care.
She adds, "I had a complication myself when I had my first child seven years ago and it was managed very seamlessly in a hospital in New York City in a birthing centre, but I learned shortly thereafter that it was the number one cause of maternal death. Learning that made me want to understand more about the barriers to care around the world that we need to deal with."