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A Healthy Baby Girl by Judith Helfand
About the Filmmaker:

Judith HelfandJudith Helfand defines herself as a filmmaker/ organizer and has worked as a documentary producer and educator for the past ten years. She co-produced and co-directed The Uprising of '34 with veteran documentarian George Stoney. The film was broadcast nationally on POV in 1995 and was voted one of that year's ten best documentaries by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Helfand's film A Healthy Baby Girl was in competition at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and received a Peabody Award for Excellence in Journalism and Public Education.

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A Healthy Baby Girl by Judith Helfand

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Press Release: PDF | DOC
Critical Acclaim: PDF | DOC
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PHOTOS
In 1962, after one miscarriage, Florence Helfand, a suburban Long Island mother of two young sons, became pregnant. To help her carry this baby to term, her doctor prescribed a popular anti-miscarriage drug called diethylstilbestrol (DES). All Florence wanted was A Healthy Baby Girl, and she had every reason to believe that DES was the best pre-natal care money could buy. Instead, DES compromised her only daughter Judith's future and threatened their relationship in ways she could never have imagined. At 25, Judith Helfand was diagnosed with DES-related cervical cancer. Battling personal grief, corporate power, and her mother's guilt, she turns the camera on herself and her family as she explores the drug's tragic legacy in what Newsday called "a devastatingly sad, funny and all-embracing work."

From 1947 to 1971, doctors prescribed DES, a synthetic estrogen, to millions of pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. Some early scientific studies questioned the drug's usefulnes, finding it to be carcinogenic to laboratory animals and ineffective in preventing miscarriage and by 1970 doctors had identified a rare form of vaginal cancer in some young women exposed in utero to DES.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory against its use during pregnancy in 1971, but for millions of DES sons and daughters, the damage was done — with health effects including malformed reproductive organs, infertility and cancer.

After being screened regularly during her teens and early 20s, Helfand had thought her worries were over by 1990. After the age of 25, she had been assured her chances for developing DES-related cancer were minimal. That same year, Helfand volunteered to help make a film about the drug. The filmmakers insisted that all DES-exposed crew members get an updated DES screening, so Helfand went for what she thought would be a routine check-up. Instead, she was diagnosed with potentially lethal DES-related clear-cell cancer of the cervix. "I thought I was safe, but you never outgrow your exposure," the filmmaker recalls. "I was furious, angry, depressed, hurt, and completely overwhelmed. I could not wrap my brain around what was happening to me."

Two weeks later Helfand had an emergency radical hysterectomy. She went home to recuperate at her parents' home in suburban Merrick, Long Island, and the healing process began. Refusing to confine the tears, rage, laughter and hope to family dinner table conversations, Helfand decided to address the issues head-on by making her own film — a spirited and stunningly intimate video diary.

A Healthy Baby Girl follows the filmmaker over a five-year span, documenting tense moments, tender conversations and everything in between. Determined not to be silenced by her DES exposure, and aware that she had to "get on with life," Helfand takes viewers from a bittersweet family conversation about shiva, the Jewish ritual for mourning, out to scenes of DES daughters lobbying in the halls of Congress, and back home to her nephew's bris, the Jewish ritual and celebration for a baby boy. "I think that the best thing about being human is that we have the capacity and the wherewithal to laugh in the face of tragedy," the filmmaker says. "Every time we were able to laugh or even engage in some dark humor, it made me believe that our humanity was more powerful than DES exposure and we would find a way to deal with this."

Intensely intimate and at the same time heartbreakingly universal, A Healthy Baby Girl eloquently addresses the ways in which Helfand's DES exposure affected not only her own health but also the health of her relationships with the people around her and, ultimately, how toxic exposure affects all of us. "This is a story about what happened to me and my family and my mother and our relationship," she says, "and what happened inside our house, in the kind of suburb that millions of people live in. The kind of place where everything looks okay — until it isn't.

"I made this film to remind my mother that this was not just our private tragedy," Helfand continues. "I wanted to explore chemical exposure in the context of the relationships we hold most sacred and translate what is often a statistical abstraction into an urgent reality. We are all vulnerable to the long term threat of hormone mimicking chemicals; whether you were exposed in-utero to DES, or live near a dioxin emitting medical waste incinerator or are working with cancer-causing chemicals on the shop floor, or are exposed to agricultural pesticides. Since its initial release in 1997 I have worked in collaboration with the environmental health movement to actively use the film as a precautionary tale — reminding manufacturers, public health officials, policy makers, faith based institutions and other institutional decisionmakers that the health and safety of this generation and the next must be placed well above the 'bottom line.'

"At the same time, I can say with love, respect and the utmost certainty that via this whole experience — from caring for me when I was ill, to letting me film our innermost pain and loss, to working with me to bring the film to the public, to laughing with me in the face of heedless corporate power, my mother has taught me all I need to know about parenting, motherhood and continuity."

A Healthy Baby Girl, winner of a George Foster Peabody Award, was produced in association with the Independent Television Service (ITVS).

(1997, 60 min.)

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View and Download Photos:

Note: Click on an image to open the full size version in a new window. Use File > Save As... to save the image to your hard drive. Photos are for press and private use only. All rights reserved. All uses of the photos must be credited as indicated below. For additional information on rights and clearance isssues, contact communications@pov.org.

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Caption:
Filmmaker Judith Helfand as a baby with her mother, Florence Helfand.
Credit:
Ted Helfand

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Filmmaker Judith Helfand as an adult with her mother, Florence Helfand.
Credit:
Nancy M. Stuart

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Caption:
Judith as a baby with her family.
Credit:
Ted Helfand

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Caption:
Judith as a baby with her family.
Credit:
Ted Helfand

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Caption:
Filmmaker Judith Helfand during the filming of A Healthy Baby Girl.
Credit:
Larry Ford

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True Lives is presented by American Documentary, Inc. and National Educational Telecommunications Association.

National Educational Telecommunications Association

Download the 2006 True Lives Press Release: PDF | DOC
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