My Body, My Child

My Body, My Child is a 1982 American made-for-television drama film directed by Marvin J. Chomsky and starring Vanessa Redgrave. It was adapted by Louisa Burns-Bisogno from her play of the same name.^[1] The film premiered on ABC on 12 April 1982. It includes early performances by future Sex and the City co-stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon. It is also the final television role of Jack Albertson, who was subsequently nominated posthumously for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.^[2]

Leenie is a middle-aged Irish-American schoolteacher with three grown daughters. She unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again and is delighted. However, her doctor rejects this possibility because of an unreliable blood test and her age. Thus her symptoms such as troubled sleeping and sickness are misdiagnosed as psychogenic. She is prescribed a host of medications to cope with these difficulties. It later turns out that she is in fact pregnant, and that these medications have been causing irreversible damage to her unborn baby. Faced with the truth that her child will be born with defects, she faces a decision to keep the baby or go against her religious beliefs and have an abortion.^[3]

John J. O'Connor of The New York Times praised the talent involved, but lamented that Burns-Bisogno's play was expanded from a small personal drama into a wider story with "tangential plots and subtexts, most of them having to do with the greed and sheer incompetence of the medical profession".^[1] He also noted that characters besides the protagonist are thinly sketched.^[1]

• Catholicism and abortion

• My Body, My Child at IMDb