Born With Two Mothers

In the Press

"This is gripping, sometimes harrowing stuff."
The Observer

"This was television drama at its best, because it treated the viewer as an intelligent and thoughtful, resisted the cheap shot, and offered no fake solutions."
British Medical Journal

"The viewer was never allowed to feel that the decision was inevitable, or even necessarily right. It was rich in thought and feeling, but it never allowed itself the luxury of certainty."
The Independent

"Hard to tell where the script ended and improvisation began, and it didn’t really matter one way or the other. It all melded together seamlessly... and the tension was sustained until the very end."
Daily Mail

The Film

A white woman gives birth to a black baby following a mix-up in a fertility laboratory.

This innovative docu-drama uses real doctors and lawyers alongside actors to imagine what might happen.

Two couples go for fertility treatment to a British IVF clinic on the same day. One couple is black, the other white.

The white woman is mistakenly given one embryo from the black couple, and two of her own. She becomes pregnant - but the clinic do not know whose embryo is growing inside her. The black couple do not achieve a pregnancy. The medical team have to decide whether and what to tell each couple. Nine months later, the white woman gives birth to a black baby boy, Joe.

Both couples involved want to claim the baby as their own. The case is taken to court. A judge has to decide which of the four adults is his legal mother and which his father, and where Joe should live.

The outcome of the story is determined not by a scriptwriter but by real professionals who make decisions in the drama exactly as they would in real life, without any advance warning of the dilemma about to hit them.



Credits
Narrator
Writer
Producer & Director
Editor
Line Producer
Story Development
Assistant Producer
Co-ordinator
Photography
1 x 90' for Channel 4