Switched Before Birth (Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next of last night’s Lifetime movies was the much-ballyhooed “premiere,” Switched Before Birth, a “take” on the risks and overall chanciness of in vitro fertilization in which – as the promos for the film made clear – two women’s embryos got mixed up and one got implanted in the other’s womb. (The promos actually made it look like both mothers gave birth to each other’s babies, but that’s not the story writer Kelly Ferguson wrote.) Once again, we have a story that carefully ignores or explains away the sheer amount of money the principals are spending trying to have their own biological children despite nature’s constraints. Though one claimant couple, Anna Ramirez (Justina Machado, who delivers a full-bodied – physically and emotionally – performance that’s by far the best in the film) and her husband Gabe (Yancey Arias), are entrepreneurial enough they own three successful restaurants, that’s not that lucrative a business; while the other couple, Olivia Crawford (Skyler Samuels) and her husband Brian (Bo Yokely), have proletarian jobs, he in construction and she as a clerk in a liquor store whose owner seems boundlessly patient with her when she keeps asking for time off to visit her fertility doctor and drives her to the hospital when her water breaks while she’s working. The action centers around something called the Nori Family Center – at first I thought “NORI” was an acronym for something but it turns out to be the name of the doctor who runs the place, a heavy-set (East) Indian with a manner perched uneasily between the beneficent and the creepy. Olivia has already lost two IVF babies to miscarriages when the film begins, but somehow she and her husband have been able to scrape the cash together for another try. Meanwhile, Anna has learned from that creepy Dr. Nori that the reason she hasn’t been able to get pregnant au naturel is not her fault, it’s her husband’s: somehow his sperm is defective and unable to fertilize his wife’s (or anybody else’s) eggs.

So Dr. Nori sends her home with a photo book containing profiles of potential sperm donors, including accounts of their family histories, careers and hobbies, and they pick one after Gabe has rejected Anna’s first choice as too white-looking to father a Latino couple’s child. Writer Ferguson spends the first hour of the movie carefully building up a loving and mutually supportive friendship between Olivia and Anna as they meet by chance at the fertility clinic, obviously to increase the irony of what’s going to happen to them later – which we know in advance if we’ve seen the promos – which is that they’ll be at each other’s throats. Dr. Nori ministers to them on the same morning but gets the samples mixed up; Anna gets one of her own embryos but Olivia gets both one of hers and one of Anna’s, and as things turn out Anna loses hers in a miscarriage (another miscarriage? Miscarriages ex machina are becoming one of Lifetime’s most annoying clichés) while Olivia gives birth to a boy and a girl whom she and Brian assume are fraternal twins. Only the first indication they get that they’re not only not fraternal twins, they’re not fraternal at all, is when boy Sam’s blood test comes back type AB (both the Crawfords are type O, as is their daughter Mia). Then they get a call from the clinic that there was a “mixup” and she was accidentally impregnated with Anna’s embryo as well as her own – and the friendship between the two women immediately turns into scorched-earth antagonism as both Olivia and Anna sue for custody of Sam. The officials at family court try to arrange a meeting between the two women to see if they can settle it themselves, but when Olivia says she’s keeping Sam but will allow Anna “visitation,” she goes berserk and grabs Olivia’s arm, forcing the court personnel to break them up and end the session.

Switched Before Birth isn’t that good a movie – director Elisabeth Röhm (best known, at least to me, for her four seasons as a prosecutor on the original Law and Order) gets a great performance out of Justina Machado, the rest of the acting is pretty blah and she doesn’t have the command of suspense or dramatic intensity Annie Bradley brought to The Good Father, and Fullerton’s script seems like two movies stuck together, a Hallmark Channel-ish first half and a more Lifetime-esque second – but it clarified for me why I get a creepy, skin-crawling feeling about all these bizarre biomedical tricks being used to get people to have children when nature pretty clearly doesn’t intend them to. Though he’s only in that one scene, the actor playing Olivia’s father expressed my view completely when during a family dinner he asks her and Brian why they are spending so much money, time and effort to conceive artificially “when there are so many babies out there who need good homes.” He asked the question I’d been asking all movie: why don’t they adopt? Yes, I know that a lot of couples out there are obsessed with having “their” children instead of raising someone who, however much you might love them and regard them as your own, are not your biological kin. The growing consciousness about genetic diseases, particularly ones that develop later in life, has also helped discourage adoption and made families who do adopt more willing to keep the adoptions “open” so they can remain in touch with the birth mother and do workups about the risks of genetic diseases.

Still, there’s a fetishistic aspect to the whole artificial-fertility biz – “This child is mine!” – no matter how detached the process of bringing that child into the world is from normal human reproduction. It gets even detached in a story like this when you realize that the child Anna and Gabe are fighting so hard to keep is biologically hers but not his – and it gets even farther out when couples hire a surrogate to carry their pregnancy for them, and even worse when the surrogate is also the biological mother. There’s a sense of “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature” about this whole subject, as well as a bit of Brave New World and the obvious parallel between the dilemma facing the judge in the family court case – a rather nerdy-looking young Asian guy named Mariposa (Kurt Yue) – and the one King Solomon had to deal with in the Bible between two rival mothers claiming the same baby. Röhm and Fullerton do create genuine suspense about how the final court case will go – through much of the ending I thought the judge would award custody of Sam to the Crawfords simply because they’re white and the Ramirezes are Latino; and if he gave Sam to the Ramirezes it would be because as successful independent businesspeople they’d be able to give him a more affluent upbringing as the Crawfords. (Financial questions like that have a lot more to do with how familiy court decisions are made than we like to think.)

In the end [spoiler alert!] the judge awards Sam to the Ramirezes on the ground that, while there are hardly any precedents for the courts in dealing with IVF babies or any mismatches between them, generally in disputes like this the courts favor the biological parents, and that’s what he decides to do here (even though, as mentioned above, Anna is the only one of the four parties who actually has a genetic connection to Sam). Then Kelly Fullerton reverts to Hallmark territory for an ending that’s supposed to put a happy gloss on the story – the Ramirezes have decided to make up with the Crawfords and allow them visitation (something Anna had previously refused and the judge had explicitly ruled that she didn’t have to), and the last scene jumps ahead several months to a joint birthday party for Sam and Mia, with the Crawfords and the Ramirezes all present and wolfing down the gluten-free cupcakes Gabe has baked for the occasion. Switched Before Birth isn’t that great a movie, but it sure raises a lot of uncomfortable issues about just what it means to be a “parent” and what the key ingredient is: Genetics? Experience? Bonding? (Olivia is understandably upset at losing a baby she not only carried inside her womb for nine months but raised for five months after that.) The film ended with a title noting that there still are no government regulations on in vitro fertilization, an oblique warning to Lifetime viewers (especially women who want children but haven’t been able to have them by the “normal,” fun way) that IVF is a jungle and they’d better beware of evil, incompetent or simply sloppy operatives posing as “fertility specialists.” There was also one amusing shot of the so-called “success stories” posted on Dr. Nori’s wall, one of whom is of a Gay couple (we know that because we see them kissing in the photo), and one wonders what the mechanics of that were, including which one was the sperm donor, how they recruited a woman to be their surrogate and whether Lifetime will someday give us a movie about them, and in particular about the very nasty custody battle likely to ensue in case they break up and the biological dad pulls rank on his former partner in family court.