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We're living in miraculous times where connections are made at the blink of an eye, the tap of a thumb and the click of a mouse. We can never replace human interaction, but these simple actions can be powerful and meaningful to those we connect with. We can talk about dinner with friends in another hemisphere and connect with strangers to share ideas, argue perspectives and change the way we see the world. In fact, every time we pick up the phone the next call we make could do more than brighten a day. It could save a life. That's the power of technology, and if you think it's anything short of a miracle, take a peek at modern-day life in any rural community in the developing world. In parts of India, Pakistan, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and many other regions where even electricity and running water seem like impossible dreams, simple, affordable, technological solutions we take for granted are at the center of daily life, the connection to the rest of the world.

In parts of the world where basic infrastructures like paved roads and transportation systems are underdeveloped, people walk for days to reach a health care provider. They walk for miles when they're in desperate need of a doctor and when they're simply pregnant and need prenatal care. In recent years however, healthcare systems have become increasingly linked with individuals and organizations through technology and by partnering with the "private" sector to eliminate barriers and tackle challenges that prevent patients from getting the healthcare they need. These partnerships have created a phenomenon called mHealth, described as the use of mobile and wireless devices to improve health outcomes, health services and health research, and it's changing the way healthcare is provided to people all over the world.

In the world of maternal health, cell phone technology is being used to provide prenatal care, linking pregnant women to health care providers when they can't otherwise reach healthcare facilities. This allows individual maternal healthcare providers to interact with and gain support of larger healthcare systems. The impact one cell phone can make on the life of a woman in labor anywhere in the world when she doesn't have the time or means to get to healthcare is remarkable.

In the worst-case scenarios (which happen to hundreds of women every day), women deliver at home, alone, develop complications and die because no one is attending them with skills or training to save their lives. But if a woman has access to a cell phone she has access to her community health worker or midwife, and lifesaving help can be just a phone call away. If her birth attendant or midwife doesn't have the skills or supplies she needs to treat this mother's obstetrical emergency, she can call for an ambulance and consult with a doctor who can coach her through the complication or assist the mother until she arrives safely at a hospital to receive emergency obstetric care.

Today, all over the world, cell phones connect mothers with vital healthcare services, but they also support overwhelmed health workers, enabling them to scale up their reach and impact. They help doctors consult with specialists and review lab results. They allow community health workers to reach hundreds of patients and information that just a few years ago, they didn't have access to. Through the growing power of mHealth, if somebody has a cell phone handy, lives are saved.

When we were filming No Woman, No Cry, cell phones became the critical link between our crew and the vulnerable moms we were documenting in the final days of their pregnancies. We handed out cell phones to each of them and waited for the calls each night that would tell us our next move. Every Mother Counts was established following the film's debut as an information resource and link to other initiatives focused on reducing preventable maternal deaths in pregnancy and childbirth. Since 2010 we have been highlighting the challenges and solutions of maternal health. Anyone who has a cell phone understands that mHealth is a solution already proven to impact maternity healthcare around the world.

This month, Every Mother Counts' focus is all about connection. That's why we're doing a cell phone drive in partnership with Hope Phones, an organization founded by Josh Nesbit, a smart and compassionate man who on an overseas internship had an 'aha' moment that's now saving lives. While following a community health worker on his on-foot patient rounds, Josh discovered his cell phone had six bars of service thanks to a newly installed cell phone tower. He realized if a health worker and his patients had access to cell phones, instead of reaching dozens of patients, he could reach thousands.

We're amazed how fast technology is changing here in the United States, but we're inspired by the difference it is making in developing countries. We live in miraculous times where energy poverty can be eliminated through the brilliance of technology, the passion of people with big hearts and the partnerships of organizations that bring them together. Join us and help us prove that Every Connection Counts and learn how mHealth is changing the world and how you can help.

Grand Losses:

Musings on My Miscarriage

Anonymous

My heart is broken. The breaking process has been a seemingly long drawn out arduous shattering. I feel like the cracking is audible sometimes, at other moments it is as subtle as a whisper.

Three months ago I gave birth to my daughter. I was 15 weeks pregnant and, like so many reproductive anomalies, I was tragically shocked and taken over with grief from the inside out. As she emerged from my body, my shrieking cry was nothing compared to the utter physical relief I felt as she dangled from me. Connected by the umbilical cord, our lifeline, I stared at my darling daughter as she hung from me and I from her -- both suspended from reality.

The day before I had started spotting and promptly went to my doctor, where I heard her heart beating beautifully. Later that evening contractions began, on and off spotting- the pain was undeniable. I toyed with going to the emergency room, despite hearing the heartbeat just hours earlier. I phoned my friend who is a midwife to solicit her insights, still endeavoring to remain calm in a sea of physical and mental confusion. I felt overtaken. I knew that this was the beginning of the end of the life growing inside of me. I wasn't so much panicked, as I trusted my body to know that something was definitely not right and that something deeply tragic would be revealed shortly.

Having had a wrinkle-free conception, pregnancy, and birth experience with my son 4 years prior rendered me compass-less. Of course nothing would have prepared me for something so horrifying, so tragic, so surreal. Nothing.

And just like that I entered into a glaring statistical grouping of women that I have been hearing and reading about for ages. I always knew that approximately 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage. Since it hadn't been a part of my lived experience, it felt like a distant fact, like so many other health crises we are surrounded by and hope to never become intimate with.

I not so gingerly shared my story with friends, family, and people who randomly remembered I was pregnant. They seemed to want to know every detail with expressed care and concern. I even showed them a picture of my daughter when asked. Though I didn't necessarily feel armed with any hardcore tools to navigate the extent of my trauma, I increasingly became more stunned by the reactions -- the actions and inactions of people around me.

I am left feeling more alone than I ever thought possible. Solicited or not, countless women say to me, "Why is no one talking about miscarriage. No one talks about postpartum depression either. All of these things women go through that nobody talks about. Why are we not talking about it if everyone is going through it?" It's only now that I realize why I don't want to share my experience as openly anymore. The more I talked about it, the less understood I felt.

All I yearn for is the simplest of engagement, "How are you feeling?" Four words. Nothing more.

Instead, I am bombarded by horror stories of women losing their longed for dream in a pool of blood or heroic war stories of women whose histories in no my way resemble mine and go on to have healthy children. Are the details of someone's sister's friend's friends' 4 consecutive miscarriages supposed to be heartening?

Women use my openness about my loss as a springboard to delve into their reproductive aches and pains, recent or decades old. The sharing feels tinged -- needing to be less this, more that, better than, more than, and most definitely triumphant in achieving their desired family size. I propose that we simply listen to one another, with presence of mind and heart, no matter the level of uncomfortability.

Here is a sampling of what women have shared with me over the ensuing months that at first felt heart warming but quickly dipped into competitiveness and all too often fraught with a shocking undercurrent of judgment ..."I had a miscarriage too but luckily mine was at 6 weeks so it wasn't such a big deal like yours", "I seriously would have jumped off a cliff if I had gone through what you went through. I could never have lived through that." "I know this doctor you should see who specializes in women who have had multiple miscarriages. Maybe he can figure out what happened to you." "At least you weren't that attached to having 2 children. I always knew I had to have 2 kids so I would have killed myself if that happened to me."

And then there is the deafening silence... The silence of sisters, mothers, colleagues, and dear friends I've had since I could crawl. It's unclear which hurts more -- the convoluted questions or participating in pretending that nothing ever happened and isn't it amazing that it's 80 degrees in February?! Are we seriously coercing each other into thinking that by focusing on the weather we will make the remarkable mainstream? And isn't it almost always 80 degrees, cloudless, and sunny here in Los Angeles? We all know that what is going on in our bodies and the losses we've experienced within them can leave us disproportionately speechless but we must stretch to find words. Words of loving kindness, words that normalize reproductive situations that happen globally, words that leave us feeling whole rather than bruised.

Some of these interactions feel deeply loving while others feel pointedly harmful. Are we really competing for a less challenging reproductive journey? When you say that yours was easier than mine, what are you saying? Are you feeling less damaged? Less victimized? More empowered? It hurts me and it actually hurts you too and all the other women riding this reproductive roller coaster to minimize, to distance, to compare and contrast. It's tempting to explain that my life is the only life I would want to live, despite its pitfalls and unforeseen traumas. I hold my breath.

When the pathology report came back 2 weeks later I learned that my daughter had an extra X chromosome. My amniocentesis was scheduled to take place 2 weeks after the miscarriage. I would have been faced with a monumental decision. To terminate or not to terminate. I have always felt grateful that my daughter came out whole in the privacy of my home, where peace and profundity were possible. The genetic information reiterated to me that my body and my daughter danced, albeit uncomfortably, to assist in bypassing a life-changing decision. Instead she made the decision for me, for herself. Unabashedly.

Last Saturday my midwife friend who has been by my side through this unprecedented sea change in my life, turned to me plainly with exuberant love and a chilling seriousness, "You totally could have died. You nearly hemorrhaged to death while giving birth. Alone. At home." Similarly, conversations with my obstetrician feel authenticating, scientifically based, and free from competitive comparisons and crazy-making circuitous superstition. I feel understood, but more importantly I feel that there is accurate reflection taking place rather than jumbled supportive banter that often leaves me feeling dizzy and sometimes meagerly depressed.

What I've learned is that people are afraid to get close to their unnamed pain, their historical landmines, and bevies of unspeakable regret, sadness, and interior discontent. People want to be there but don't know how to be or try to be and unfortunately say things that feel awkward at best and downright cruel at worst.

I am grieving my enormous loss while simultaneously feeling more at home in my body than ever before. No one seems to want to hear this. No one seems to believe me. Ironically, it wasn't until I began sharing my story of my daughter emerging from me at 15 weeks that I began to feel sprinkles of shame. Why would I be ashamed of chromosomes gone wrong? How would I have any control over this? Magical thinking and long stored up dark reserves seep out as women experience reproductive hardships. They think they must have done something to "deserve" this, had to have been "unlucky", and chase every possible line of thinking imaginable to connect the dots. There are no dots here. Miscarriage isn't about pregnancy ambivalence or anxiety, prior abortions or outbursts of venomous anger, feelings of sadness or anything else that you can seemingly control.

Miscarriage is simpler than all of that. It is loss of life that wasn't sustainable.

I have fantasies of shouting this from rooftops and tweeting random cryptic notes containing the facts about pregnancy loss in the hopes of galvanizing women's perceptions of themselves. I daydream about pleading with women not to blame their beautiful bodies for their reproductive devastations. I wish I could dare every woman who has at some point or another wondered if they were somehow the root cause of a reproductive disappointment to turn that question on its head. "What if you are not the reason that this happened to you? What if it just is?" I can't help but wonder if this would illicit more anger, more grief, more relief, and/or more hope. Or maybe something else completely. I am confident that it would engender less competitiveness, less perfectionistic strivings, and more self-love.

My heart sags as I collect countless unfortunate stories of loss and the way women believe they caused it. Maybe in blaming themselves for the unthinkable reproductive tragedies they feel a shred of control, hoping this might yield a very different outcome next time? Passionately perfecting pregnancy is not within our wheelhouse. We are not in charge of chromosomes. Culture tells us that we can have what we want when we want it if we just try hard enough to attain it. Perhaps we so desperately believe we can achieve anything we put our minds to that women feel an unruly amount of competitiveness despite logically knowing there is not much we can control here. Maybe it leaves us too vulnerable to think that we can become a reproductive statistic just by being who we are? I'd like to invite women to believe, if only for a moment, that what they have journeyed through is not a fault of their own but instead a very real possibility for anyone brave enough to get messy in the making of babies.

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Signataires: Christy Turlington, Joke Silva, Gillian Anderson, Kate Redman, Global Media Consultant, Save the Children International et Shabana

Patti Smith: "Somalia"

Christy: Patti told me she wrote this song years ago, after seeing a segment on the news in which a child literally died in the arms of its mother. That memory was still very present to her in 2011 during the crisis in the Horn of Africa, so she thought, "If I could give this mother what I have -- fruit on the trees, a healthy child -- I would." She went into the studio and brought along her daughter, who's now grown and married, to play piano, and gave us this version of the song.

Kristi: The sparse arrangement and earnest vocal are arresting, especially for those who aren't acquainted with Patti Smith's catalog. Reflective and beautiful.

Rita Wilson: "Baby I'm Yours"


Christy: I got to hear some of the songs Rita and Patti Scialfa were recording for her new album AM/FM, which comes out on May 8. I already knew Rita could sing -- she's one of those talented people who can do anything -- and her voice sounds amazing on this song.

Kristi: It's prescient, too, since she recently appeared on NBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, where it was revealed that her father's first wife died tragically after childbirth from eclampsia gravidarum, a dangerous pregnancy-related condition. (The actress is also editor-at-large for Huff/Post50.)

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros: "Mother"


Christy: Alex Ebert saw my documentary (2010's No Woman, No Cry) and was really moved by it, so he went into the studio to record something new for this CD. He actually put music to a poem he wrote and it turned out so personal and intimate. The band shot a video for the song, too, with their mothers, which will be released next week.

Kristi: What I love about this one is that the words are contemplative, but the groove is almost hypnotic, with a late-1960s/early-1970s psychedelic vibe.

Bono and the Edge: "Original of the Species"


Kristi: U2 is one of the few bands whose words and melodies aren't obscured by the complexities of their arrangements. From a parent's perspective, it's nice to hear this anthem to human individuality sung as advice to a child -- "You are the first one of your kind," indeed.

Christy: Bono wrote the song with his daughters in mind. It's wishful and imparts the idea that, "I'm here and I'm watching you take your steps forward and I'm supporting your independence, but at the same time, I don't want you to make mistakes." Any parent can relate to that.