Madre y Hija

Sunday I went to see another movie at the cinemateca boliviana, basically the La Paz version of the Hippodrome or the Gene Siskel Film Center. And since I have a little more time on my hands here than at home, I can finally take advantage of it. Madre y Hija (Mother and Daughter) is the latest of Iñarritu’s films, who also filmed Crash and Babel. The movie is mainly about abortion and how it affects people’s lives. It’s hard to talk about the movie without giving away the outcomes of the stories, but basically it follows different women through their lives and how their lives are affected by abortion. The thesis of the movie is that abortion is unnatural and created by society. I found it a pretty interesting point of view, first because I am a big fan of the movie Juno (it was one of the first movies in a while showing that life doesn’t end if you make a mistake) and secondly because I just finished a week working in Servicio de adolescentes with pregnant women. The movie follows a middle aged woman who gave up her daughter for adoption when she had her at age 14 and has never stopped thinking about her since, a 37 year old woman who was given up for adoption and thus never wants to have kids, a woman who can’t have kids but wants a child very badly, and a 20 year old girl who is pregnant with a child and wants to give it up for adoption. In almost all the cases, the supporting characters are against the adoption, maintaining the opinion that giving up a living thing that you bred inside of your body for 9 months is completely against our nature and that the baby is always better off with their birth mother. If the woman can’t have kids, then it just wasn’t meant to be. The movie obviously has a twist at the end and doesn’t maintain a black/white opinion on the subject by the end, but I thought it was a thought-provoking subject. Lately, with movies like Juno and documentaries on international adoptions, we see the many happy couples who are finally able to love a child of their own, and the conservative’s opinion on how adoption is better than abortion because a live is saved, but I haven’t seen as much media portrayal of the other side, of the mother who gives up her child for the rest of her life, making a decision that may later cost her years of her child’s life. Maybe in some cases, abortion may be a better option than adoption for the mother’s psyche, because then she has less time to get attached to the child while it’s in her womb.

Obviously, each case is different and what’s the best decision for one woman may not be the best for another woman, and to say that adoption (or even abortion) is always a good choice or a bad choice is juvenile and inconsiderate. Nevertheless, I appreciate it when someone creates a film, a book, or even a song about an intimate and powerful subject that causes people to re-evaluate their own beliefs, even if they don’t end up changing them.

Regarding Bolivia, abortion is pretty much illegal here except for special circumstances when the mother’s life is in danger. Almost every patient I have seen, no matter what age (I haven’t seen any girls younger than 16), whether or not they are married or with someone, choose to have the baby and keep it. Abortion or adoption doesn’t really seem to even be brought up in discussion. There are obviously other debatable issues that surface, since many of these babies end up living in poverty either because their mothers never finished high school or because it’s her 5th child and she can’t feed that many children. Is it better to live in poverty and be beaten by your alcoholic stepfather or not live at all? Is it better to be adopted into a nice family or to live in a slum with your birth mother? And of course, there are all those lovely gray areas in between where we must accept that we don’t really know how a child’s life will turn out based on only one decision – we can only guess and hope that we can live with the decision we have made. After all this, all I can say for sure is that the women I see in clinic who decide to go back to school after having a child are some of the strongest that I have ever seen, and I hope they are the ones who improve the amount of opportunities that their children have with the amount that they have had.