2008-09 Feinberg Series: A Healthy Baby Girl
This 2008-09 Feinberg Lecture Series event features a screening of A Healthy Baby Girl, followed by discussion with Jennifer Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at Hampshire College.
This Thursday Film Series event is co-sponsored by the Lively Arts program, the Fine Arts Center and the Department of Music and Dance at UMass Amherst.
From the filmmaker's website: "A Healthy Baby Girl is an intimate, humorous, yet searing exploration of what happens when science, marketing, and corporate power enter our deepest family relationships. A Healthy Baby Girl is an inter-generational story of one family's response to an ethical and technological crisis, experienced from their home in Merrick, Long Island.
"In 1963, filmmaker Judith Helfand's mother was prescribed the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES), meant to prevent miscarriage and ensure a healthy baby. But technology is rarely a benign midwife. In 1990, at age twenty-five, Helfand was diagnosed with DES-related cervical cancer. She went home to her family to heal from a radical hysterectomy. There she picked up her camera. Her video diary, A Healthy Baby Girl, was shot over five years and goes beyond loss to document mother-daughter love, family renewal, survival, political awakening, and community activism."
This event is free and open to the public.
