The resurgence in rhetoric around a woman’s worth being measured by the number of children she has is an unwelcome one for many reasons, but one in particular stands out when watching Maite Alberdi’s quasi-true-crime documentary A Child Of My Own. So much of the pain and hurt that follows stems from seemingly innocuous comments about a young wife’s inability to have a child, but over time and compounded by the loss of several pregnancies, it drives her to do something unthinkable. A Child Of My Own blends first-person accounts of the case, archival footage, and a sizable recreation of events to explore Alejandra’s experience of enduring years of societal pressure, personal desire, and family judgment to produce a child. After three miscarriages, Alejandra convinced herself and those around her of a fake pregnancy, and when the due date arrived, she emerged from the hospital with a baby that wasn’t hers.
The first half of A Child Of My Own recreates Alejandra’s side of the story. Alberdi auditions actresses to play the young Alejandra, and once she’s cast, the film reconstructs Alejandra’s wedding in great detail, from replaying their real wedding song in the background to slowing down the actors’ action—which is filmed on an old digital camera—creaing a facsimile of a time capsule, an illusion of a fairy tale come true.
The real Alejandra narrates the story and details her emotional state, which quickly moves from jubilant over marrying her love, Arturo, to deflated, recalling her first miscarriage. Their family was not entirely understanding, especially Arturo’s mom, who blamed her. Years later (in the narrative), the actress playing Alejandra sits in a doctor’s office with her husband after yet another miscarriage. Once again, she internalizes their critiques of what she should or shouldn’t have done. By the third miscarriage, Alejandra loses the heart to tell her family about yet another loss. When she tries bringing up adoption with Arturo, he rebuffs her, insisting on having his own biological children. By chance, she happens to meet Mayra, another young mom-to-be, in the hospital waiting room, who tells her she can’t have another child out of wedlock. Alejandra swoops in with what seems like the answer to both of their problems: What if she takes her baby and raises it as hers?
At least, that’s the story that Alejandra tells Alberdi. As A Child Of My Own continues, the director finds the real Mayra in order to get her side of the story. Mayra produces evidence that the two women had never actually met—she only went to the hospital where Alejandra worked to give birth, not for check-ups—and punctures the fantasy that Alberdi’s recreation depicts. After interviews with Arturo, Mayra, and a few experts, including the case’s judge and a psychologist, the film shifts away from the delusional recreations and revisits the real-life scenes recreated earlier in the film: Alejandra and Arturo’s wedding, her tearful baby shower, and when she walked out of the hospital with Mayra’s baby in little more than a gift bag. Reality is much more sobering than the outsized stories Alejandra told to justify her actions.
Alberdi films Alejandra in the final stretch of her 13-year prison sentence and in the subsequent years after her return to Arturo. After we follow Alejandra’s stories, and she watches their recreation in a structural homage to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing, the conclusion of A Child Of My Own is still bittersweet. One hopes that Alejandra has grown from the experience—and her expression of regret over not being able to have a second take on her life’s choices seems to indicate as much—but even more than a decade later, Arturo’s desire to have a son still affects their lives.
Alberdi’s documentaries have always been sensitive to her subjects. She went undercover with an amateur private investigator at a nursing home in the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent, which later inspired the Ted Danson show A Man On The Inside, and in her last documentary (also nominated for the Oscar), she followed a couple through the pangs of Alzheimer’s in The Eternal Memory. A Child Of My Own deviates from these by playing with chronology and perception, not in a sinister way, but to make the audience think. As viewers revisit the case, listen to testimonies, and replay the videos—both real and recreated—doubt sets in. The film’s narrator is afforded our sympathies, but meant to be questioned in order to find a deeper truth.
Beneath the many lies Alejandra told herself and others to pass off her fake pregnancy, there’s the truth of how women are hurt by the gendered expectations of parenting. For Alejandra, her worth as a wife centered solely on producing kids, and when she couldn’t, her husband and his family criticized her relentlessly. Arturo’s mother alternatingly lambasts Alejandra for continuing to work and for trying to take it easy; in her day, women kept going through it all during their pregnancy.
Alejandra could do little right in her family’s judgmental view, but that is the kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” reality many women face when thinking about family planning. Just look at the right-wing outrage over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s public IVF journey. Aren’t they supposed to be the party advocating for more babies? At the same time certain politicians are calling for more babies to be born, it’s the most dangerous time to deliver a baby in the U.S. in the past 30 years: There’s still no federal maternity leave, social programs meant to help young mothers and babies (like WIC) are getting cut, and women experiencing miscarriages in states with abortion bans risk sepsis, infertility, and death because they can’t get timely care. When we devalue half the population’s worth to only one outcome, everybody suffers. A Child Of My Own is just one more extreme consequence of these social factors.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.