‘Baby/Girls’ Review: Doc Paints a Bleak but Judgment-Free Portrait of Teenage Motherhood in Contemporary Arkansas

The joys and challenges — but mostly the challenges — of young motherhood are explored in Baby/Girls, a sympathetic if conventionally constructed documentary co-directed by Alyse Walsh and Jackie Jesko and premiering at SXSW this year.

Revolving around a bevy of white teenage women who all spend some time at Compassion House in Springdale, Arkansas, a charitable Christian group home that helps troubled kids get to grips with parenting, the film unpacks the sadly cyclical nature of teen pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, the teens we meet are all daughters of teenage mothers. In addition, it’s clear that patterns of addiction, negligence and vulnerability to sexual abuse will probably keep recurring in these families, along with mental health issues, passed down through generations like hand-stitched heritage quilts of misery.

Directors Walsh (TV series Home) and Jesko (Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything) started filming after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and enabled Arkansas to completely ban terminations, making this feel like an especially timely choice of subject. Interestingly, as it turns out, that ruling has not resulted in the huge uptick in unwanted pregnancies round these parts that some expected. To summarize one interviewee who works at Compassion House, anti-abortion beliefs are pretty much already well baked-in by now in areas like this after years of pro-life messaging.

In fact, in this church-riddled region, “contraceptive” is practically a cuss word itself, and none of the young mothers met here have ever had any kind of sex education in school, leaving them ignorant not just about how to prevent pregnancy but about the basic facts of biology. (Abstinence is the only advice the state allows to be dispensed in public schools.) One pregnant 15-year-old, Olivia, casually shares that she only just learned the other day that her body has three holes down below instead of two, and that the one babies come out of is not the same as the one used for excreting urine.

In fact — and this may be a controversial position — at times the profound ignorance of the young people met here may make it hard for some viewers to feel all the sympathy for them that they deserve. Yes, you can see that the state and institutions like their churches have failed to educate them. But at the same time, some of these kids seem hellbent on screwing up their own chances at a better life. Ariana, for instance, who otherwise comes across as one of the brightest of the three the film mainly focuses on (and who at one point says she’d like to become a lawyer herself), finds herself pregnant again with a second child by the end of the movie, having decided for reasons not explained to have her IUD removed. Luckily her partner Brian, or “baby daddy” as she calls him, seems both emotionally supportive and willing to co-parent reasonably responsibly. But they don’t seem entirely sanguine about the decision to have a second child, especially given their earlier protestations that it was deeply problematic having the first one before Ariana even got out of high school.

It’s to the filmmakers’ credit at least that they unjudgmentally show the subjects making what some might consider grave mistakes with their lives. Grace, for example, is yet another example of someone who is herself the daughter of a teenage mother (Audra) and who finds herself following in her mom’s footsteps. In this case, however, Audra is clear-eyed enough now that she’s in her 30s to see that Grace, who loves to party and wants above all to hang out with other teenagers, isn’t capable of taking care of her infant daughter Emerson by herself. Audra tries to take on the childrearing for her, but has four other kids to look after, at least one of them preadolescent, and multiple sclerosis to deal with. She quite sensibly persuades Grace to put Emerson up for adoption in the film’s final minutes. But before viewers have enough time to release a cheer for this rare display of sense, end titles reveal that they ended up suing to get the adopted baby back and won. [Heavy sigh.]

Those closing credits cheerily attempt to suggest that the three girls we’ve met are growing and perhaps making better decisions now, but who knows how long it will last? Some might regret the film doesn’t spend more time hearing from the people who work at Compassion House aside from Crystal, one of the key workers there who was herself once a teenage mother. Without more longer-distance, mature points of view, the doc risks playing a little like depressing reality TV, and compassion fatigue isn’t fully mitigated here by any kind of cinematic elan that might break up the grimness.