Becoming A Mom When You're Still A Child: 'Baby/Girls' Documentary's Unflinching Look Teenage Motherhood
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, workers at an Arkansas Christian maternity home, Compassion House, prepared for a drastic increase in young women in need of their services. It never came. “The pro-life movement in the South won the war against abortion a long time ago,” says Compassion House coordinator Crystal Widger in Baby/Girls, a bold new documentary about teen motherhood in post-Dobbs America.
For Baby/Girls, which premieres at SXSW on March 12, directors Alyse Walsh and Jackie Jesko spent two years following three pregnant teenagers who passed through Compassion House while their childhoods got upended by young motherhood. “What we found was that it was a bunch of people just trying to do their best,” Jesko tells SheKnows of the girls and staff at Compassion House.
Widger, who became a mom at 14, knows intimately the sacrifices girls who come to Compassion House make in a state with a near-total ban on abortion yet does very little to aid its teen mothers. “We need to look at the reality that the South leads the nation in teen pregnancies,” says Widger. “We take away the option for abortion. We’re not providing adequate sex education. All that does is set us, as women, up for failure.” One of the girls, 15-year-old Olivia, casually shares that she just learned that the vagina has three holes despite being far along in her pregnancy. Another says she was already pregnant by the time she received sex ed.
The three girls were themselves born to teen mothers, and are navigating cycles of addiction and abuse within their families. That, coupled with the alarming lack of financial upward mobility afforded to the lower class, means the documentary has no choice but to take bleak view of teenage motherhood.
“Poverty is obviously a through line throughout the entire film. It was important for us to show the generational component of that,” says Walsh. 21% (more than one in five) kids in Arkansas still live below the poverty line, well above the national average of 16%. “We feel that [the documentary] is really representative of larger issues that happen in families all across the country and not just in the South.”
As one does before one turns 18, some of the girls are rebelling. 15-year-old Grace wants to party with friends and hang out with her boyfriend, leaving her mom and younger siblings to do the brunt of the childcare for her baby, Emerson. But her mom, Audra, has four other children to take care of. In one of the documentary’s most devastating moments, Audra suggests Grace consider giving the baby up for adoption.
“I know that you love her, but I also know that you want to be a teenager,” Audra says. “You want to do all that more than you want to be a mom, but she deserved to be loved full time.”
There is no glossy, happy ending for the girls. The film makes no attempt to show a way out of their situations. Such is the hopelessness of having an unplanned pregnancy in post-Dobbs Arkansas. “We very intentionally did not want to make this an advocacy film for one particular policy,” says Jesko. “These laws are being made so far away from these girls’ lives. I don’t mean literally, I mean they don’t know anyone in the state legislature. They’re not part of that conversation, but they are the ones who are most affected by these laws.