“Birth Is for Pussies” is TV pilot at SXSW 2026.

Hannah Healy—actress, filmmaker, and doula—brought a TV pilot “Birth Is For P*ssies” to SXSW. The series focuses on giving birth and is based on Hannah’s ten years of experience as a doula in New York City. Hannah is an actor, writer and director based in NYC and London. As an actor she most recently appeared as Charlotte Astor in season 3 of HBO’s “The Gilded Age”.

Producing the TV pilot with Hannah  is Celine Sutter, a writer, director, and producer born and raised in New York City. Celine recently earned her MFA in Writing/Directing from Columbia University. The original score was provided by King Princess.

PLOT SYNOPSIS

The synopsis of the first episode shows a rookie doula (Hannah Shealy) thrust into her first birth with a mother she’s never met. After a rocky start, she quickly learns that supporting women through labor is messier, funnier, and more profound than any doula training could have prepared her for.

I found Hannah Shealy very sympathetic in the role. I also loved the Tribeca penthouse where Hannah visits a pregnant couple (Danny Defararri and Madeline Wise), an apartment which had a jaw-dropping view. I’m not a New Yorker, but I was in town when JFK, Jr., tragically died on July 16, 1999. Residents of  New York City were leaving flowers in front of his Tribeca building. I wondered if this location might have been near where young John F. Kennedy, Jr. lived. The view and decor were opulent.

CONfLICT

For me, Madeline Wise had already distinguished herself in the SXSW film “Chili Finger.” She was equally good in this as the pregnant wife who doesn’t want her spouse to know about her herpes diagnosis. That might set up some conflict to come (during  delivery) but conflict has to be there. If I learned anything at all from the University of Iowa’s Writing program it is that. Conflict is not as prevalent as I think it needs to be in a series about giving birth.

While Hannah was lovely and the mother-to-be in a less-ritzy part of NYC was as stressed as you would expect anyone would be if they were in labor, the conflict quotient for the brief episode I saw was slim. I’m no expert on giving birth ( as the line goes, “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies”) but this series needs a serious elevation in the conflict levels or I fear it will be DOA.

TREND

Hannah Shealy.

On the plus side, I do think that Hannah and her producing partner Celine Sutter are on to something in the zeitgeist. For decades the United States was one of the civilized nations whose birth rate was holding relatively steady. Then Donald J. Trump began his anti-immigrant ICE raids. His daily quotas of picking up citizens and non-citizens on the streets of cities nationwide and ejecting them from the country has certainly contributed to statistics that show the nation’s birthrate — that is, the number of live births per 1,000 people in a given year — is down by more than 25 percent since 2007, when the decline began.

“We spent decades shaming women for having kids under the wrong circumstances, for not having their ducks in a row,” said one expert. “Now they are holding up their end of the bargain.”  Almost half of the country’s 30-year-old women are childless.

“SIXTY MINUTES” DID A PROGRAM ON THE IDEA OF WAITING TO GIVE BIRTH

Putting off having children in order to finish school or establish one’s self or simply to live life a little before “settling down” has become the norm. As one expert said, “It used to be that the only people who put off having kids were college girls from more privileged backgrounds. But now it’s everybody, with teenagers and less educated women leading the charge. “

Women in their early 30s now have the highest birthrate of any group. A woman in her early 40s is more likely to give birth than a teenager. It’s too early to say whether those pregnancies will be enough to help the U.S. reverse the ill effects of a falling birthrate. The number of children born to women by the time they turn 44 hasn’t dropped at all.

BIO

Celine Sutter

In my own case, my mother gave birth to me at 38, which was considered quite old for the times. Mom was a working woman who supported herself until she married at age 30 in 1937. Given the fact she was born in 1907, that means she was way ahead of the working woman trend. Also ahead of “have children later in life” current trend.

We can assume that the birth control gains of the sixties and seventies (now being reversed by the GOP) which gave women control over their own bodies has contributed to women deciding not to give birth as soon.  Maybe they were too young. Maybe they were unemployed or alone. Maybe their own mothers were struggling  to give their daughters the future they never got to have, because they got pregnant in their teens. “Biology was destiny” for years—until the 1960s and the advent of the birth control pill.

CONCLUSION

I gave birth to two children, a son and a daughter born 19 years apart. I was pregnant at 22 and 42. My youngest, a daughter in her thirties, is now hoping to give birth in the immediate future. She and her partner actually lost a baby to a rare anomaly very recently. The odds of a re-occurrence of that are astronomically high.

She has had the opportunity I did not have to travel the world, find herself, and figure out what she wants from life, thanks to the birth control pill and the hard-fought Roe v. Wade right to a legal abortion, (which I fought for in the seventies.) Now legal abortion is state by state. The blue states are often being selected by the more educated citizenry (doctors, lawyers and other professionals) since those individuals want, for their wives and daughters, the rights that women enjoyed for fifty years, until  the conservative stacking of the Supreme Court.

MOTHERHOOD ON FILM

I’ve noticed that recent films and TV shows—like “Night Bitch” or the upcoming “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” on television—are depicting a more realistic side of motherhood—one might say “warts and all.” There was also the Charlize Theron 2018 film “Tully.” “Birth Is for P*ussies” might fit right into that trend.

I’m all for informing women about the process of giving birth in a way that is more realistic than the one depicted in films like 2007’s “Knocked Up.” Perhaps “Birth Is For P*ussies” will educate us all.  I’m all for informing women about all aspects of their sexuality.