Over 36,000 women in Nigeria die each year due to post-delivery complications. In her documentary, "The Edge of Joy," Dawn Sinclair Shapiro focuses on the pregnancy of several Nigerian women - following them, their families, and medical staff on the day they go into labor.

"I started researching the project two years ago," Shapiro said in an interview with MediaGlobal, "I wanted to look at the technology available to these women and how it made their experience different from women giving birth in a hospital in the US"

Nigeria has the second highest rate of maternal mortality in the world. At present, 1 in every 18 women die giving birth verses 1 in 4,800 in the US.

"I don't think anyone would compare Chicago to Nigeria in terms of the experience and scale of the problem, but you can see in both environments the disadvantages of access for mothers giving birth in low-resource settings," said Shapiro.

Beginning her career as a journalist working for CBS News Sunday Morning, Shapiro has since worked for Tribune Broadcasting, CNBC, MSNBC, Dateline NBC, and Chicago Public Radio. Over the years, she has seen how poverty, both in the developed and developing world, can affect maternal health.

"For us, a sonogram is part of the emotional experience of becoming a mother, but it's also a fairly standard medical procedure. For women in rural Nigeria, a sonogram is a rarity. Imagine if you couldn't see your baby or even worse if the doctors delivering your baby couldn't either."

For the film, Shapiro interviewed several healthcare workers in Nigeria's Kano and Oyo states who witnessed the issue of maternal mortality first hand. She says watching them work helped illuminate just how many factors play into the medical care of pregnant women:

"One of the women we filmed started experiencing hemorrhaging and there we saw how blood acquisition, something that was necessary to save her life was not just a medical issue but tainted by religious beliefs as well."

The issue of maternal mortality in Nigeria is a complex one affected by both medical and social factors. Shapiro believes that the way to take on maternal mortality is to deal with all factors simultaneously.

"It's an intellectual exercise to say 'we just need to work on education' when the cultural aspect is so evident. Right here in the States, we have cultural norms that govern our conversation about women's health," Shapiro pointed out. "There's always culture in the discussion, we just have different entry points."

In recent months, the conversation around maternal mortality has received increased attention. At the April Women Deliver Conference in Washington DC, Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon called for a joint-action plan to accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals and decrease maternal mortality rates by 2015. Ban repeated his call while attending the screening of supermodel Christy Turlington's film "No Woman, No Cry."

However, even with the Secretary-General as an advocate, Shapiro says raising public awareness remains an uphill battle.

"I've talked to news editors who have said, 'we did our piece on that already for the year, we're done.' So we've had to find ways to pitch this issue to media outlets in a way that is fresh even though the story - the human tragedy - should be compelling enough."