About the Film

Love, Your Birth Mom provides a lens into adoption from the untold perspective of its central figures: birth moms. The feature-length documentary serves as an intimate portrayal of being pregnant and questioning whether you have the support, resources, or ability to raise your child. A lot of attention is given to abortion access, but there is little discussion around the structural forces that have left some pregnant women questioning whether they’re able to raise their kids. This intimate, character-driven film provides a window into the experience of navigating an unplanned pregnancy through the lens of adoption and in doing so, addresses several cultural crises of our time: reproductive justice; class and racial disparity, entrenched gender roles; and historic ideas about who is fit to be a parent and who isn’t, particularly for single women.

Synopsis

Rachael is recently divorced and working hard to keep her family afloat. She is considering adoption as a means of survival - for herself, her other kids, and the baby that’s on the way. Rachael is also an adoptee and always felt that her birth mom didn’t love her. She worries that if she chooses adoption, her child would struggle with the same sense of abandonment. But if she keeps her baby, will the rest of her family suffer as a result? Nikole just graduated from high school and is due with a baby girl in January. Within one month of graduation, Nikole’s dad passed away from cancer, and she found out she was pregnant. At nineteen, she’d just lost a parent, and she questions if she is ready to become one herself. We follow each woman throughout the third trimester of their pregnancies as they consider placing their baby for adoption. The story builds to the moment when each woman will deliver her baby. She will then have 48 hours before being discharged from the hospital to make her final and permanent decision - whether to raise her child or place them into the arms of another family.

Director’s Statement

“I wish it could be me.” These were the final words that my daughter’s birth mom whispered to me after placing her baby into my arms. I can still hear the tremble in her voice as she uttered the words that made me a mom. I had never seen grief like that. As an adoptive mom, I don’t pretend to understand its depth and contours, but I do know this: We don’t grieve what we didn’t first love. I want my daughters to understand that, so I started making this movie.

As  an adoptive mom, I am often cast as the hero of the adoption story. My daughters’ birth moms are cast as the villains. But why am I perceived as being more deserving of my children than the women who gave life to them? What does this perception show us about our broader understanding of motherhood? Of women? 

As a viewer, I most appreciate stories in which the storyteller is wrestling with a burden. And through their story, you feel them carry it, feel its weight, interrogate it and unpack it. The burdens I am wrestling with in this story are a set of questions: 

What does it mean to be a mother? 

What are our judgements about women with unplanned pregnancies, and why are they different from those we apply to men? 

Who do we deem ‘fit’ to be a parent? And what does class, race and gender have to do with that ‘fitness’? 

Ultimately, for women who choose adoption, how can we understand their decisions through a lens of tenderness, empathy and nuance? Too often, our adoption narratives begin with what was found. But the reality is that the adoption story actually begins with loss. How can we reframe the story of adoption to decenter its adoptive “heroes” and instead pull focus on its central figures: birth moms.