Woman faked pregnancy before walking out of hospital with baby in a gift bag
Warning: This article contains references to miscarriage that some readers may find distressing
On 17 June 2009, Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza (Alejandra) walked out of a Mexico City hospital with a gift bag in hand.
However, that oversized bag contained an hours-old baby girl – who was not her daughter.
Alejandra had faked a pregnancy after suffering a third miscarriage and her story is now the subject of true-crime docudrama A Child of My Own.
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Released on Netflix today (13 August), filmmaker Maite Alberdi explores the extreme lengths the then 26-year-old went to in her desperation to become a mother.
The doc begins with a stylised recreation of Alejandra’s version of events before we meet her in jail, where she was sentenced to 13 years for kidnapping.
When she was 17 years old, the woman was pregnant and marrying her husband Arturo, having always wanted kids.
However, she suffered two miscarriages and ended up undergoing IVF. Becoming pregnant for a third time, Alejandra miscarried again but kept it a secret.
She told her story to Alberdi, claiming that she had met single mum Mayra while working in admin at a hospital. Supposedly, she didn’t want to keep her baby and agreed she would hand over her newborn to Alejandra.
But when the hopeful ‘mum-to-be’ took the baby girl, she ended up arrested hours later with Mayra and her daughter reunited.
It turned out the mother’s witness statements didn’t match up to any of this – she claims she met Alejandra for the first time after she gave birth, as she posed as a social worker on the ward.
There hadn’t been any kind of arrangement, and the evidence backed this.
“When I saw the evidence, I thought: ‘Oh no, I was so wrong.’ I crashed into reality,” Alberdi told The Guardian.
When she confronted Alejandra after spending so much time visiting her in prison, the woman ‘denied everything’ and continues to now.
And Alberdi decided to stick with the film despite the truth, as what had connected to her the most was the ‘pressure’ Alejandra felt to hide her miscarriage.
“It was not about the case; it was about the situation,” the filmmaker explained.
“I was more interested in why she faked a pregnancy. It was a question of the social pressure of motherhood in Mexico, in Latin America.”
And in the doc, with her extravagant baby shower making her feel ‘so special’, Alejandra told the director: “I felt like I was living in another dimension. Many times, I wanted to say, 'this isn't real' or 'this isn't happening'. But I couldn't.”
While she is interviewed during the final weeks of her sentence, Mayra also features in A Child of My Own.
“I feel no compassion for her," she says of Alejandra. "She felt no compassion when she stole my baby."
Dr Norma Romero Sanchez also features, the forensic psychologist who assessed the woman after her arrest.
“To become complete as a woman, she believed she needed to be a mother," she told the BBC. "Psychologically, we have huge pressure in Mexico and Latin America for women to become mothers. She also had a physical condition leading to continuous miscarriages, but there was no expert medical opinion to explain why. She was living a fantasy as a mechanism of self-defence to a very painful reality."
Alejandra was released from jail in 2023 and she told the documentary that she’d spent her sentence ‘coming to terms with not being a mom’.
"My desire was more about pleasing others," she said. "Because I thought what else is there, apart from becoming a mom? But I finally realised there's so much more to live for."
A Child of My Own is now streaming on Netflix.
If you need support and advice following a pregnancy loss, you can contact the Tommy’s team at [email protected]. You can also call them for free on 0800 014 7800, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
Topics: True Crime, Netflix, Documentaries
Jess Battison