It was a tragic case which happened in the summer of 2008, the worst nightmare for any expectant mother. A baby was still born. The midwife tried desperately to resuscitate her but no oxygen was getting into the little girl’s lungs and she was pronounced dead. Her parents named her Greta.
Four years later, the midwife and doctor at the birth, Anna, was put on trial. Greta’s parents were the plaintiffs.
Filmmaker and journalist Katja Baumgarten tells the fraught and complex story of what happened next in her new feature documentary Greta’s Birth (a premiere at DOK.fest München). She was ideally placed to cover such a case. She is a trained midwife herself as well as being the editor of a leading midwifery magazine. She reported exhaustively on the trial as a journalist.
Baumgarten sees similarities between midwifery and documentary filmmaking. Both require patience and empathy. Just as she tries to provide a mother to be with “a secure space to give birth,” she wants her protagonists on camera to be at ease. “I will give them all the time they need. I won’t force them to say something to me.”
The director’s original idea was simply to be there at the start of the court case and then to come back in time for the verdict. “At first, as a journalist, I wrote about this case and I didn’t want to make a film. That wasn’t my idea.”
However, she became fascinated by the trial. Her son, a talented draughtsman, provided drawings of the courtroom which she uses in the documentary. (No cameras were allowed in the trial). As a midwife, she understood all the nuances and technicalities about the evidence. She met Greta’s parents outside the courtroom. The mother later told her she felt her magazine reporting in the midwifery journal about the case was balanced. Nonetheless, Greta’s parents decided against participating in the documentary – and implored the director not to continue with it.
Baumgarten didn’t take their advice but strived to make the documentary equally balanced. Nonetheless, it has a Kafkaesque quality. The midwife had been trying to do her job but ended up being prosecuted in a court of law. The judges seemed determined to find her guilty, ruin her financially and to destroy her life. She was a woman, a feminist and an advocate of home births.
“I think this was the main issue in this case – Anna stands for a feminist view on births and for giving power back to women…”
The doctor working with the prosecution was, as Baumgarten puts it, “very against home births. That was a bias I would say.”
Ask the director why she feels Greta’s parents were so keen to see Anna in the dock and she gives a measured response.
“From my point of view, they were traumatised to the maximum by the whole nightmarish situation of Greta’s death. I’m sure they have had heavy feelings of guilt themselves. I think it is possible that they were also pushed very much in the direction of blaming Anna for all of Greta’s death by those around them – also to unburden their own responsibility in their decision. The chief assessor, of course, completely encouraged them in this direction, that Anna’s actions were the cause of the catastrophe, and left no doubt about it. This will have strengthened them to direct all their negative feelings towards Anna.”
Through her medical journalism, Baumgarten had already met Anna, who wrote occasional articles for the journal she worked on. Anna was very open and spoke frankly and movingly on camera about what happened to Greta.
The filmmaker believes case like this set a dangerous precedent. Last autumn, another German midwife was prosecuted after a baby died in childbirth.
“Who will it help to send the midwife and doctor to prison for years?” the director poses the question which many spectators are also bound to ask after watching the film. Her own response is that it was “crazy” to convict Anna. “It wasn’t reality. It was the fantasy of the judges.”
Baumgarten knows “many other doctors and midwives who have had the same experience when a child dies during birth.” If they were all at risk of being sent to prison every time a procedure went wrong, no-one would even enter the profession.
On her documentaries, Baumgarten takes on many different roles. She produced Greta’s Birth as well as doing the sound and narration. She shared the editing duties with Christian Iseli, her husband, and did the cinematography alongside her friend Gisela Tuchtenhagen. “I wanted to have the freedom to stop the project. I didn’t know if it would get to the end,” the director explains why she works with such a close-knit team and keeps tight creative control over her films.
Funding for Greta’s Birth came from nordmedia Film – und Mediengesellschaft mbH…but that was back in 2014. “I thought in three years the project would be finished. I had to beg them to let me [have] more time,” she says of a project which has taken over a decade to complete.
After her four year sentence in prison, Anna has been left in a terrible situation. Now in her late 60s, the former midwife doesn’t know whether she will be able to hold onto her home. Greta’s parents and their lawyers could still force her to sell it to pay fines and legal fees. Her reputation is destroyed. “She can’t start a career in another profession. She has lost everything. She is not the same as before, of course. She tries to get through it…but she is hurt.”
The irony is that it is far from clear that Anna was responsible for Greta’s death. “There are other opinions which the judges [in the court case] didn’t want to hear. I met them some weeks ago and they still have the opinion that Greta wasn’t healthy.”
There are no mechanisms to hold the judges to account. “This professional risk which Anna has, or doctors have – judges don’t. If they make a mistake, nobody cares and there are no consequences,” the director observes of a legal system which seems neither transparent nor fair.
