I Want to Keep My Baby (1976)
Directed by Jerry Thorpe
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Synopsis by Hal Erickson
I Want to Keep My Baby is a cautionary TV movie starring Mariel Hemingway as a pregnant 15-year-old girl. She is pressured by her mother (Susan Anspach) to keep her baby, despite the warnings of a social worker (Rhea Perlman) that the girl is emotionally and financially unable to care for the child. Taking a defiant attitude, Hemingway insists upon setting herself up as a single parent. It is only after a few harrowing months of unassisted motherhood--and a brief temper flare-up in which Hemingway comes dangerously close to injuring her child--that the girl bows to logic and puts the baby up for adoption. I Want to Keep My Baby would have been more effective without such melodramatic setpieces as a rape attempt and a chance encounter between the girl and a pair of adoptive parents.
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Keywords
adoption, baby, mother, single-parent, social-worker, teen-pregnancy