A new Netflix documentary finds an unconventional way into the wild true story of a woman who pretended to be pregnant and kidnapped a newborn baby from a hospital.
A Child of My Own, out Aug. 13 on Netflix, follows Eleonor Alejandra Marin Mendoza, nicknamed Ale, who served more than 13 years in prison for kidnapping a baby in 2009 at the Mexico City hospital where she worked. Before taking the baby, Ale had faked being pregnant to her family and friends.
Ale does not deny the fake pregnancy or the kidnapping, saying in the documentary, “What did I do wrong to be here? Breaking the law, lying, deceiving, causing pain.”
Her retelling of the crime is so dramatic that the first 50 minutes of A Child of My Own are produced like a feature film, with professional actors playing out Ale's version of events. Then, it’s followed by interviews with the real-life Ale, the baby’s mother, Mayra Navarro, Ale’s partner, Arturo Garmiño, and a judge who presided over Ale’s case, Taissia Cruz Parcero.
Here’s what to know about the scandal that made headlines in Mexico, why Ale felt compelled to fake a pregnancy and kidnap a baby, and how she got caught.
The question of consent
The dramatized first half of the film is meant to represent director Maite Alberdi’s own journey exploring this subject as a documentary filmmaker, starting with meeting Ale in prison in 2022 while working on another project and learning her side of the story. And it is meant to represent Ale’s “fairy tale” version of events, “the story that she tells herself to survive,” says Alberdi. “She’s dreaming.”
Ale doesn’t deny taking the baby, but to this day, she insists that the baby’s mother Mayra agreed to give it to her. At the same time, Ale pretended to be pregnant, doctoring medical records to make it look like she had ultrasounds and binge-eating junk food to put on weight quickly so that her belly would expand. When it came time to “give birth,” her plan was to pretend to deliver at the hospital by herself and then surprise her husband at home with Mayra's baby.
Ale says she met Mayra in a hospital waiting room five months before Mayra was due to give birth. Ale claims that Mayra said she wanted to get an abortion, but told Ale that she decided she would rather give the baby up for adoption. The movie version of her story shows the two women in a hospital waiting room, making a pact that Mayra would give her baby to Ale. When the fictional Mayra gives birth, she thrusts the baby into Ale’s hands in the hospital and says she’s off to Chihuahua.
None of that was true, says the real Mayra later in the documentary.
“There was never a deal,” she says. “If you’re going to give away a baby, you wouldn’t do it inside the hospital, right?”
Parcero, a judge in the case, notes that after considering all of the evidence, “in the end, the only thing that didn’t fit was Mayra’s alleged consent or the claims that she had consented.”
She runs through the key evidence, like scans of Mayra’s appointment card that show that Ale and Mayra could not have made a pact at the hospital months before the birth because Marya had her checkups done at a different health center.
Mayra says she met Ale for the first time right after she gave birth. Ale came by her room and said she was doing a survey for the hospital. Mayra says she could not have fled to Chihuahua—or anywhere, for that matter—because she was running a high fever. She went to the bathroom to provide a urine sample to test for an infection, and when she came back, the baby was gone. Mayra assumed a nurse was bathing or feeding the baby: “Never, never did I think my baby was kidnapped.”
Police arrested Ale about eight hours later. Parcero recounts how authorities found Ale’s sweater with her ID badge in Mayra’s room. Security camera footage showed her entering the hospital with an empty shopping bag just before noon and then walking out of the hospital around 6:30pm with the newborn in a shopping bag. Police tracked down Ale, Arturo, and the baby in a nearby hotel room.
Arturo, who believed Ale had given birth to his child, spent two years and six months in prison before he was acquitted. “There was no malicious intent on his part,” Parcero says. "He wasn't an accomplice."
Why Ale faked a pregnancy
Ale says she pretended to be pregnant in a desperate act to please her husband and their families after the couple suffered three miscarriages. Arturo didn’t want to adopt, and Ale felt a lot of pressure to get pregnant and have a baby.
“I was afraid and scared that [Arturo] would leave me for failing to become a mother and that I’d be targeted and judged,” Ale says. “Actually, I was judged for something much worse in the end.”
Ale convinced her family that she was going to have a baby, and the movie version of her narrative shows her using medical records at her hospital to create her own ultrasounds. In home video footage played in court and featured in the documentary, Ale appears at her own baby shower, opening presents and caressing her swollen belly.
Alberdi points out that Ale faced pressure not only family pressure but also social pressure because in Mexican and Latin American culture, many “cannot understand a marriage without a baby.” Alberdi hopes Ale’s “extreme case” will make viewers think about “invisible pressures to be a mom.”
At first, it seems like the pressure is off Ale when she’s released from prison in 2023 at 39-years-old, after going in at age 26. She says she wants to work, take trips to the beach, and won’t try to get pregnant again.
“Before, I think, my desire to be a mom was more about pleasing others,” Ale says. Now she wants to know, “What else is out there beyond being a mom?”
Arturo and Ale stayed together when she got out of prison. But eventually, he asked her to have a baby again. “I would indeed like to have a child, not as much as before, but I still have that desire engrained in me,” he says in the documentary, explaining that he likes the idea of children as a way to carry on their parents’ legacy.
Alberdi said it was hard to learn that Arturo still wanted Ale to get pregnant.“[Ale] goes back to society after 13 years, and she has exactly the same pressure again from her husband,” she said. “It's so painful to see that nothing has changed in these years, and it's a sad ending.”
When Ale wouldn’t try to have children with him, Arturo pursued a relationship with another woman, and had a son with her. But he told Ale that he loved her more and wanted to be with her, and now Ale happily co-parents Arturo’s son. The documentary ends with the three playing at a playground.