A Healthy Baby Girl -- Main Page

The Independent Television Service (ITVS) presents A Healthy Baby Girl , an intimate, humorous, yet searing exploration of what happens when science, marketing, and corporate power enter our deepest family relationships. A Healthy Baby Girl is an inter-generational story of one family's response to an ethical and technological crisis, experienced from their home in Merrick, Long Island. Produced and directed by Judith Helfand, and edited by Tricia Reidy, A Healthy Baby Girl was produced for ITVS with major funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

photo: nancy m. stuart

In 1963, filmmaker Judith Helfand's mother was prescribed the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES), meant to prevent miscarriage and ensure a healthy baby. But technology is rarely a benign midwife. In 1990, at age twenty-five, Helfand was diagnosed with DES-related cervical cancer. She went home to her family to heal from a radical hysterectomy. There she picked up her camera. Her video diary, A Healthy Baby Girl , was shot over five years and goes beyond loss to document mother-daughter love, family renewal, survival, political awakening, and community activism.

A Healthy Baby Girl is an autobiographical documentary which explores the full complexity and impact of DES exposure. Helfand's mother was one of five million American women to whom DES was prescribed between 1947 and 1971, after being told by their doctors that the drug would prevent miscarriage. Florence Helfand was a typical DES mother: white, middle-class, and confident she was receiving the best prenatal care money could buy.

DES was not only proven to be completely ineffective in preventing miscarriage but for more than thirty years, pharmaceutical companies sold DES to millions of pregnant women knowing that the drug was toxic and carcinogenic. Only in 1971, when doctors discovered the link between DES and vaginal cancer in some young women exposed in utero, was the drug taken off the U.S. market for use during pregnancy. It continued to be sold overseas. Today there is no definitive estimate of how many millions of mothers and children have been exposed to DES worldwide.

Of the two and a half million DES daughters in the U.S., roughly half have malformed reproductive organs and suffer with infertility, high risk pregnancies, and multiple miscarriages. There are 2.5 million DES sons. They have not been as closely monitored but there are reports of male infertility, and links to testicular abnormalities and cancer. Researchers continue to uncover frightening facts about the life-long effect of exposure to DES, including higher rates of breast cancer in DES mothers and daughters, and damage to the endocrine and immune systems. Effects on the third generation - DES grandchildren - are as yet unknown.

Like its infamous contemporary DDT, DES is an estrogen-mimicking synthetic chemical, wreaking havoc on the hormonal system. These chemicals have been termed "hand-me-down-poisons" by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, the authors of Our Stolen Future, because their toxic effects are not only experienced by those who are directly exposed, but also show up in their children as birth defects, cancer, or infertility. Such chemicals are in pervasive use today in pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and manufacturing. The facilities simply do not exist to detect, test, and regulate more than a tiny fraction. The very nature of their toxicity - to our reproductive abilities - bears a potent threat for our future.

Helfand's experience with DES-related cancer brought these scientific and political abstractions home - literally, into her suburban ranch house in Merrick, Long Island, where she grew up and where she went years later to heal following her hysterectomy. There, she and her mother struggled together with the range of emotions raised by their shared exposure to DES. This was also where Helfand began to question how the decisions behind corporate profit-motive had worked themselves so insidiously into her family's life. She began to keep a video diary which ultimately became A Healthy Baby Girl .

Told through her family's voices and from their home, the film offers an intimate and unique perspective from a typical American family as they deal with what motherhood means in our time, as well as the specter of reproductive technology, toxic exposure, and unbridled corporate power. As the film unfolds the audience joins the emotional evolution that comes from the healing power and political impact of sharing such a deeply personal, difficult story.

An original score by the Klezmatics - with clarinetist David Krakauer and singer Adrienne Cooper - a contemporary American klezmer band with a new world beat, subtly explores the underlying theme of family and continuity challenged by modern technology.