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Lori and Tema Karen and Eliani Debbie and Joshua As American families change in profound ways, AND BABY MAKES TWO sheds light on the growing number of "unattached" women who are choosing to become pregnant through traditional means, artificial insemination and adoption. Funny and poignant, the documentary takes the viewer on an emotional roller-coaster ride as we come to know and identify with the very human desires of the women in the film. These are not strident political activists trying to make a point but rather real, ordinary women who have not been able to find a partner willing to commit to a relationship, marriage and/or fatherhood. They are women who always thought that motherhood would be a part of their lives and, with the proverbial clock ticking, have found themselves forced to be mothers on their own. AND BABY MAKES TWO was produced by Judy Katz and Oren Rudavsky for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. AND BABY MAKES TWO follows a group of single New York City thirty and forty-something women (and their often shocked and concerned parents), for whom the ticking of biological clocks is louder than the screech of the city's subway trains and taxi horns. Over the course of several years, these six women provide support and encouragement for one another as they journey towards motherhood in a world that has not looked kindly on single moms. Far from the stereotypical "spinsters" of yesteryear, these women are intelligent, financially independent, funny, attractive and articulate-but like millions of women, things have not turned out exactly as they'd planned. Debbie & Joshua At the heart of AND BABY MAKES TWO is the story of two women in the group, Debbie and Jan. Debbie is a forty-three year-old midwife who becomes pregnant by a known donor and gives birth to a son, Joshua. Jan, a friend of Debbie's as well as her birth coach, is also forty-three and faces a rockier road to pregnancy. When her long-time boyfriend succumbs to Lou Gehrig's disease, her life plans collapse. She wants desperately to be a mother, yet despite a dozen attempts and thousands of dollars, fails to become pregnant through artificial insemination. We follow Jan's ups and downs through optimism, profound disappointment and the transition to choosing adoption. The film also briefly chronicles the quests of four other women in the group: Lori, Karen, Marcy and April. As the film begins, Jan visits her doctor for an insemination procedure. There she runs into Marcy, and the two compare notes about donors, fertility drugs and the market price of sperm. Once inside the examining room, we hear Jan's heartfelt and heartrending prayers as she awaits insemination. While she is clearly habituated to this highly medicalized procedure, her mother Rosemarie is not as comfortable. Rosemarie confesses "It's just so alien to me, and to all the values of giving a child a father. I mean, to explain to a child, who's your father? Just a sperm." The reactions of Debbie and Jan's parents are captured with honesty and humor. These grandparents-to-be share their conflicted feelings about their daughters' untraditional choices. Their discomfort, however, is offset by practical concerns for their grandchildren's well-being and the unbridled joy of grandparenting. Debbie's parents, who had been initially skeptical, are on hand for Joshua's delivery and provide consistent hands-on support after his birth. Debbie's mother jokingly exclaims, "I've become her slave." Like Jan, Lori has been unable to conceive through artificial insemination. Affirming that "the goal is to become mothers, and it's okay how we get there," she decides to adopt a baby girl from Shanghai. When Lori returns to New York with her new daughter Tema, Debbie, Jan and other members of the group greet her at the airport-a fitting metaphor for arriving into a new identity. Meanwhile, Jan is losing hope about the prospect of conceiving a child through artificial insemination. Each procedure makes her feel like "a gambler in Atlantic City hoping that the next quarter will be the jackpot." Even fertility drugs, which she had resisted initially, fail to yield a pregnancy. As the film closes, Jan, inspired by Lori, resolves to pursue international adoption. AND BABY MAKES TWO highlights the struggles and satisfactions of single women who decide to have children on their own. Ultimately their concerns and joys are not so different from those of two-parent families. They worry about how to get it all done, how to build a life with this new person and how to be good enough mothers. They face and discuss the questions their children will later ask about their fathers. And they continue to hope that romantic love will come their way. By the end of the film, Debbie's son Joshua has celebrated his first birthday and Jan is off to China to meet her own long-awaited daughter. In their quest for motherhood, these determined single women have not only secured beloved babies, but have carved out a new definition of family which includes grandparents, relatives and other single mothers. The end of the film is only the beginning. Each woman embarks on the uncertain path of motherhood: a hard-won, but never questioned destiny. Home | The Story | The Issue | The Filmmakers | Resources | Comments | ITVS