Christy Turlington Quotes

We can't end poverty if we fail to save the lives of our world's mothers.

Child marriage and pregnancy … is the biggest cause of teenage female deaths in the world.

After delivering my daughter in 2003, I endured and survived a hemorrhage, the leading childbirth-related complication that takes the lives of thousands of other mothers all over the world.

It makes no sense to spend precious resources on propping up loss-making, state-owned enterprises when they could be used to get more children into school or provide more midwives to reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth.

The message of our campaign is "Make every mother and child count". This campaign is not just about health. It is also a powerful call for radical progress in women's rights and the rights of their children. Too often, the health of mothers and children does not count. In too many parts of the world, they are forgotten.

Dying in childbirth is something that's not new; it's been going on for ages, and so it's not something that people focus on; it's not something that gets funded a lot, and it's exactly for that reason that we are losing mothers all the time, and we have kids with no mothers.

The United Nations Children's Fund reports that more than 18 million children worldwide have lost both parents to the ravages of AIDS, starvation, war or natural disasters.

Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.

I had a really scary pregnancy and a very difficult delivery. My daughter and I are lucky to be alive.

Something as simple as better breastfeeding could save a million children a year.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?

My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.

If birth matters, midwives matter. In Europe, there are hospitals where the cesarean rate is less than 10%, and you'll find midwives in these hospitals, you'll see a lot less re-admissions with infections and complications, and you'll see a lot less injury to mothers.

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.

For millions of girls around the world, motherhood comes too early. Those who bear children as adolescents suffer higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates, and their children are more likely to die in infancy.

It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

Adults worldwide can today look forward to a life-expectancy of 60 plus. But not young Pakistani women: they die like flies, daily, during childbirth...

I quote the following statement which I saw the other day: "We have lost in all the wars waged in this country since the Declaration of Independence, 244,000 men, killed in battle, and in the past twenty-five years we have lost 375,000 mothers in child birth." Prenatal care in the early months is vitally important and we should do all we can to educate young mothers to go to a doctor if they can afford it, if not to a free clinic to be taught how care for themselves. This is necessary not only for mothers but the babies. With proper care before birth, a child will come into world stronger and healthier.

By starving our children of men, we have made them more vulnerable to the very abuse we are trying to prevent.

I did marry, I did get pregnant, but as I was giving birth, my daughter and I almost died. We were rushed to the hospital. I had an emergency cesarean and in that moment, in the emergency room, I felt my grandmother come to me. She was with me and when my daughter was born, instead of naming her Hailey, I named her Lucy after my grandmother. Hailey lives in the pages of my books.

No child should die in the dawn of life.

Every day we hear about the dangers of cancer, heart disease and AIDS. But how many of us realize that, in much of the world, the act of giving life to a child is still the biggest killer of women of child-bearing age?

[On her UNICEF work:] I'm glad I've got a name, because I'm using it for what it's worth. ... I do not want to see mothers and fathers digging graves for their children.

We have an opportunity to focus global attention on what should be obvious: every mother, and every child, counts. They count because we value every human life. The evidence is clear that healthy mothers and children are the bedrock of healthy and prosperous communities and nations.