SXSW: ‘Arrest The Midwife’ (review)

With the notable exceptions of Witness and Kingpin (and, more recently, Sarah Polley’s Women Talking), big screen depictions of the stubbornly old school, modernity-eschewing  Amish and the slightly more technology-tolerant Mennonite communities of North America are few and far between.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine the Hollywood pitch session for a fictionalized big budget version of Arrest the Midwife — starring, say, the all-star A-list Doubt team of Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis — wherein heartless government pencil pushers aligned with the hospital industrial complex persecute female caregivers for the “crime” of facilitating home births in underserved “healthcare deserts,” resulting in an unexpected yet inspiring alliance between seemingly dissimilar rural and urban communities to fight the patriarchal powers that be.

Yet as much as the scenario may sound like some high concept screenwriter’s pitch, that’s exactly what happened (sans Oscar-bait histrionics) in pandemic-era New York state — as chronicled by Elaine Epstein’s quietly powerful documentary about Old Order, buggy-riding white agrarian families in plain dress bonnets and wide-brim hats putting aside their preference for remaining “separate from the world” to protest and chant alongside black and Latina political activists fighting to end their own higher than average pregnancy mortality rates in a state where the practice of midwifery is criminalized despite having a higher percentage of positive outcomes than most hospital birthing suites.

Indeed, in a film suffused with notable ironies (including religious fundamentalists using pro-choice language in their arguments for maternal home birth), one of the starkest is the fact that its central protagonist, a Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) named Elizabeth Catlin (with a resume including the successful deliveries of more than 500 babies) is arrested and charged with negligent homicide as the result of an infant death that occurs after she brings one of her clients with a complicated condition to the hospital for assistance.

The case leads to additional arrests as well as tremendous stress and uncertainty for CPMs and the communities they serve, steadily raising the stakes in a timely agitprop tale of bodily autonomy, the importance of taking action, and the necessity of forming unlikely but effective political coalitions.

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Executive Produced by Ruth Ann Harnisch, Patty Quillin, Carrie Lozano
Produced by Elaine Epstein, Robin Hessman
Directed by Elaine Epstein
Featuring Elizabeth Catlin, Melissa Carman, Lissa Horning,
Linda Schutt, Michael Sussman, Esq., Linda Hamilton