How do you kill a newborn girl? You hold her by the neck and twist it.
This bland admission is not even one of the more dramatic moments in a BBC documentary on female infanticide. The Midwife’s Confession has moving scenes of the sense of closure experienced by a journalist who since the 1990s has been doggedly following a criminal phenomenon.
The investigative documentary is available on YouTube. The film is steered by the reporter Amitabh Parashar, who has been interviewing midwives who snuff out the lives of baby girls during the course of their work.
Parashar has archival footage of women who admit on camera to killing girls on the demand of their families. For The Midwife’s Confession, Parashar meets one of the midwives whom he had previously interviewed.
Siro Devi is the only one of Parashar’s subjects who refused to accept that she may have carried out the deaths. Parashar also reconnects with a social worker has been trying to persuade midwives to save at least some lives.
Parashar has previously directed the excellent documentary The Eyes of Darkness (2017), about a spate of acid attacks that mimic crimes committed by the police in Bhagalpur in the early 1980s. The Midwife’s Confession, directed by Parashar and Syed Ahmed Safi, follows the format of a television film.
Rather than allowing a narrative to emerge through the conversations, The Midwife’s Confession projects onto Parashar’s quest a pre-determined theme of guilt giving way to remorse. The insistence of extracting a confession from Siro Devi for her past actions feels forced.
The overall approach, while gimmicky, has its poignant moments. Several characters shed tears through the course of the film. But it is Parashar’s heartfelt reactions to seeing an abandoned baby girl being rescued by joggers or meeting an adult survivor that gives The Midwife’s Confession with its grace notes.
