Brian Hill travels to maternity wards, homes, and villages across several continents to follow what happens to a child depending on where it is born. Of the 130 million babies born each year, the film notes that six per 1,000 in Europe will die before their first birthday, compared with 82 per 1,000 in Africa. In Sierra Leone, one mother in eight dies in childbirth. In Cambodia, families often live on less than a dollar a day, and a child there is statistically more likely to become malnourished than to reach high school. Hill and his crew sit with new mothers as they give birth, feed their infants, and talk about what they expect for their children's futures, moving from hospital delivery rooms in wealthier countries to homes without running water or nearby clinics. The film draws its argument from juxtaposition rather than narration, cutting between births that unfold with medical support and births that unfold without it, letting the statistics on infant survival and maternal death sit beside the faces of the people living inside them.