Supermodel Christy Turlington Burns covers the October 2018 issue of C Magazine. Alison Edmond styles Turlington in noble origins looks from Gucci, Prada, Michael Kors and more for images by Pamela Hanson.

Christy meets with C Magazine at the New York City headquarters of Every Mother Counts, the non-profit organization Turlington Burns founded in 2010. Gracing more than 1,000 magazine covers for more than three decades is a part of her legacy, but Turlington Burns has a different primary purpose now. “Running an organization and raising a family forces you to prioritize. You can’t do everything at the same time,” she says. “Someone once told me, ‘You have to sequence.’ So, for me, that means family, EMC, and I guess I take the last sliver!”

The organization has raised more than $21 million, and has expanded its grant portfolio to include Bangladesh, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Tanzania, Uganda and the United States. And while maternal mortality has dropped worldwide, according to UNICEF, from 532,000 in 1990 to 303,000 in 2015, the rate of maternal mortality in America is rising, as analyzed by the Global Burden of Disease. It’s widely believed that much of this change is being driven by Republican policies determined to close down Planned Parenthood, often the only women’s health clinic in poor areas of America. Texas, for example, now has the maternal death rate of a third world country.

Turlington Burns has made it her mission to change the reality of maternal death for poor women wherever they live. “We’re thinking about the whole package, but we’re also one of the only organizations that focuses on the mother,” she says. “Mom is not just a vessel, she’s not just a means to an end. We’re trying to focus on postpartum care and how critical the ‘fourth trimester’ is.”

Turlington Burns’ documentary series on maternal health releases its fifth installment ‘Giving Birth in America: California’ in October. Produced with filmmaker Clancy McCarty and distributed in partnership with CNN, the film is set in Watsonville, Central California. The film follows an immigrant farmworker from Mexico who is expecting her third child, as she progresses through pregnancy and childbirth in Calif, a state in contrast to Texas that has made major progress in decreasing maternal deaths.