LOVE, YOUR BIRTH MOM provides a lens into adoption from the untold perspective of its central figures: birth moms. The feature-length documentary serves as an intimate portrayal of being pregnant and questioning whether you have the support, resources, or ability to raise your child. 

Observed with quiet proximity, LOVE, YOUR BIRTH MOM offers a new perspective on the families we inherit and create, and the profound responsibility of carrying another person through love, uncertainty, and loss. The film invites audiences to sit with moral and emotional complexity, asking universal questions about care, belonging, and what we owe one another.

Ultimately, the story reveals all that we carry as women - the impossible choices we make, the incredible strength we possess, and the quiet sacrifices we bear.

“I wish it could be me.”

These were the final words my daughter’s birth mother whispered after placing her baby into my arms. I can still hear the tremble in her voice as she said the words that made me a mom. I will never fully understand the depth of her grief, but I know this: grief like that only exists because love does. I wanted my daughters to understand that, so I began making this film.

As an adoptive mother, I am often cast as the hero of the adoption story, while birth moms are too often absent or reduced to the women who “gave up their babies.” LOVE, YOUR BIRTH MOM began with my desire to turn the camera toward the women our adoption narratives so often leave behind.

But making the film has also required me to interrogate my own place within those narratives. Why am I perceived as more deserving of my children than the women who gave life to them? Who do we deem “fit” to parent, and how are those judgments shaped by class, race, age, and circumstance? What does it mean to choose to become a mother or to choose not to?

As a filmmaker, I’m drawn to stories that move us before they ask us to make sense of them. I’m less interested in films that persuade or lead audiences toward a particular conclusion than in those that create the intimacy necessary to sit inside another person’s experience, especially when that experience is complicated or contradictory. LOVE, YOUR BIRTH MOM has deepened my commitment to that kind of storytelling.

Success, for me, is when audiences feel the weight of these women’s choices rather than being told what to think about them. I don’t expect viewers to leave LOVE, YOUR BIRTH MOM with the same conclusions about adoption, abortion, or reproductive choice. I hope instead that they leave with a deeper understanding of what it means to make these choices, to live with them, and to carry everything that follows.