This spring, Nice News is partnering with Every Mother Counts for our Cause of the Season — a quarterly fundraising initiative spotlighting nonprofits making the world a better place. Click here to donate, and read on to learn more about the organization.
Every day around the globe, more than 700 women die from pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum complications. A high concentration of these deaths happen in poor regions and areas affected by conflict, but it’s also a crisis in the United States, which, despite spending the most money per capita on health care, has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries. Then there are the racial inequities — in the U.S., Black and Indigenous women are about three and four times more likely to die from pregnancy and birth than white women.
Though these facts are troubling, Every Mother Counts considers hope among its core values as it works toward creating a world where the maternal health journey is safe, respectful, and equitable for all. And it’s not blind hope: Most maternal deaths are preventable.
“It’s so easy to frame this as a crisis and to sort of lean into the urgency of it all, and it certainly is urgent. There is no reason why mothers should still be dying in 2026,” Nina Rabinovitch Blecker, Every Mother Counts’ vice president of communications and marketing, told Nice News, adding: “However, there is reason for hope.”
Rabinovitch Blecker cited newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that 85.7% of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable. “It’s not just the majority — it’s the extreme majority. And the solutions are not expensive solutions,” she said, continuing, “We just need to make sure that people can get the care they need, and that they feel comfortable accessing the care.”
Every Mother Counts takes a three-pronged approach to achieving that for mothers around the world: raising awareness, investing in community-led solutions, and advocating for systems change.
That first prong hinges on storytelling, which is how the nonprofit formed in the first place — after experiencing a childbirth complication, Christy Turlington Burns made a documentary called No Woman, No Cry highlighting maternal health challenges. The reaction to the film led her to found Every Mother Counts in 2010.
Since then, the organization has released more films, including a Giving Birth in America series that spotlights the stories of mothers across seven states, in addition to sharing stories through social media and offering a press fellowship to expand media coverage of maternal health.
The community-led aspect of Every Mother Counts involves small grants with an outsized impact. “We are partnering with these very small, community-based organizations, both in the U.S. and in seven other countries around the world,” Rabinovitch Blecker explained. “We really lean into the local leadership and the belief that the people who are based in their communities know their communities’ needs best.”
One of the main areas of focus for these grants is workforce development, meaning investing in midwives, doulas, birth attendants, and other community health care workers, “so there’s just more folks offering care,” she said.
Finally, systems change — as the name suggests — is all about working to enact policies that will improve maternal health.
In the U.S., Every Mother Counts has been among the organizations advocating for the passage of legislation that supports moms, babies, the perinatal workforce, and community-centered care, including the Momnibus Act, Midwives for MOMS, the BABIES Act, and more.
Policy change, like most change, takes time, but Every Mother Counts isn’t stopping anytime soon, not until we have a world where every mother truly counts.
“Everybody has a mother, loved a mother, some folks are mothers themselves,” Rabinovitch Blecker said. “Everyone can come to the issue from that shared experience.”
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