‘Baby Doe’ Is an Unflinching Look at a Devastating Case of Denied Pregnancy

"I think it's really hard for people to understand that a woman could not know she's pregnant, but it does happen," the documentary's director, Jessica Earnshaw, told Jezebel.

By Audra Heinrichs | March 28, 2025 | 10:48am

Photo: SXSW Entertainment Movies

‘Baby Doe’ Is an Unflinching Look at a Devastating Case of Denied Pregnancy

In June 2019, Gail Eastwood-Ritchey was arrested at her home in Euclid, Ohio. When police arrived and asked the 49-year-old mother and grandmother if she knew why they were there, she responded: “a baby that was left.”

That’s the first of many startling confessions in Baby Doe, a new documentary that premiered earlier this month at SXSW and that chronicles the fallout of a decision Eastwood-Ritchey made 26 years earlier. Director Jessica Earnshaw uses Eastwood-Ritchey’s story to explain “denied pregnancy,” a phenomenon that the National Library of Medicine acknowledges as a “pathological issue”—the condition can be “a consequence of trauma, the wish to not have a child, or a psychiatric problem,” though some studies also acknowledge that it can have non-psychological causes.

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In 1993, Eastwood-Ritchey left her newborn in the woods outside the Cleveland suburb where she lived. Paralyzed by the thought of being rejected by her then-boyfriend, Mark; her family; and her friends, she didn’t register the pregnancy until the baby was born. Over two decades later, the conservative, ostensibly pro-life tenets of her community would lead to her arrest and a life sentence in prison, costing her everything.

“She really desperately wanted help, but just didn’t know how to ask for it,” Earnshaw told Jezebel. “And for me coming into the story, what struck me is thinking about a girl having nobody to talk to and being pregnant. That, to me, felt like the heartbreaking story.”

The term Denied Pregnancy, or pregnancy-negation syndrome, was first used in the 17th century by French gynecologist François Mauriceau, who suggested that some women were unaware of their pregnancy due to continued vaginal bleeding. In subsequent years, the definition has expanded and evolved to include pre-existing mental diagnoses, like trauma and depression.

“It’s not in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), but the reverse—a woman who actually thinks she’s pregnant, but there’s no baby there—is,” Earnshaw told Jezebel. “I think it’s really hard for people to understand that a woman could not know she’s pregnant, but it does happen.”

There have been a handful of high-profile cases in which denied pregnancy was argued as a defense, though not successfully. In 2022, Theresa Bentaas told the court she didn’t know she was pregnant until the baby was born and discovered he wasn’t breathing; Bentaas was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 2024, Melissa Jean Allen Avila claimed she didn’t realize she was pregnant until she gave birth to what she thought was a deceased infant that she left in a dumpster when she was 19; Avila was sentenced to 16 years in prison. And in 2016, Emile Weaver delivered a baby inside the Delta Gamma Theta sorority house at Muskingum University after months of denial; Weaver was initially sentenced to life in prison but was resentenced in 2023.

During Weaver’s proceedings, Dr. Diana Barnes, a psychotherapist specializing in women’s mental health, told the court that isolation or neglect in the family home, shame, and a culture of secrecy have a direct correlation to denied pregnancy. Depending on how in denial a pregnant person is, the characteristic symptoms of a healthy pregnancy can fail to manifest.

Earnshaw first learned of Eastwood-Ritchey’s story by following Weaver’s re-sentencing, in which the 28-year-old was given the possibility of parole, after it was originally denied following her 2016 trial.

“One of the reasons she even allowed me to even film was because I told her about Emily,” Earnshaw added. “She said, ‘I’ll do this for Emily. That was her motivation. That’s who she is. She’s way more likely to do it for someone else than she is for herself.”

“Gail really has internalized the idea that she’s a monster.”

Before 2019, Eastwood-Ritchey’s baby was known as “Geauga’s child,” named for the county where it was found. The rural, working class community, mired in Ohio conservatism, became a congregation to memorialize the infant and penalize the person responsible. In 1993, local residents organized a funeral, and the infant was buried in a marked grave site that lauded “the good people of Geauga and surrounding counties.” During the autopsy that same year, the coroner determined that the baby had been born alive, and the death was ruled a homicide. As archival footage shows, no one in the community questioned the circumstances. “I just hope they find out who did it,” one of the newspaper carriers who found the infant said at the time. “I hope they’re punished.”

Meanwhile, Eastwood-Ritchey lived in a state of dissociation in order to cope—not just to the denied pregnancy, but to other pain points in her life, like her father’s abuse and self-hatred. But she eventually married Mark, raised three children, became a grandmother, and remained an active member of the church. As she admits in Baby Doe, she isn’t able to remember certain details of the day she gave birth, like whether the baby had shown signs of life. And, as seen during her trial preparation, Eastwood-Ritchey seems wholly detached from most of the memory, which, as any survivor of abuse or significant trauma knows, isn’t uncommon.

“It’s like the emotional memory is totally gone,” Earnshaw said. “I think when she first talked to the detectives, she was in so much shock and some of those details became fuller for her later. But Gail never really was able to give me any details on how she felt. Sometimes I would ask her more rhetorical questions, like ‘Do you think you felt scared?’ hoping something would come back, but it never really did. It was like, as an adult, putting emotion onto a 22-year-old, not so much like being like, ‘I know I have a memory of feeling scared.’ Those are just not there.”

The stigmatization around denied pregnancy unsurprisingly has the most consequences in the criminal justice system, which currently remains ill-equipped to understand miscarriages, let alone a complicated and under-researched and largely unacknowledged complex pregnancy condition. The United States doesn’t have any legal provisions in place for women who commit infanticide, and the many men Eastwood-Ritchey has to answer to during her trial are less than sympathetic. In fact, apart from Earnshaw, Eastwood-Ritchey never once encounters a woman during her proceedings.

“I spent a long time speaking to her,” Earnshaw said. “I remember thinking at times, ‘How can she have no memory?’ probably in the same way the audience felt seeing the trial prep. But it was when I interviewed her by herself—and I think maybe she felt more comfortable with me being a woman—that she opened up in a way that I definitely had some serious ‘aha’ moments, as far as what she was up against.”

In court, Eastwood-Ritchey was forced to view the graphic photos of the baby’s corpse, marred by animals in the woods. Further, an expert obtained by Eastwood-Ritchey’s attorneys who could have properly diagnosed and contextualized her actions was barred from giving testimony by Judge David Ondrey.

“In my opinion, you took the easy way out. You coldly and efficiently eliminated your problem by disposing of the only one who couldn’t defend himself. He couldn’t yell at you or berate you like you feared your father would. He wouldn’t leave you or break your heart like your boyfriend might,” Ondrey said during Eastwood-Ritchey’s sentencing. “To me, it’s not that you had no one to turn to, you simply refused to share your difficult situation so you could deal with it in your own way. Thus, calling you a monster who deserves life imprisonment, might not be an unfair exaggeration.”

Earnshaw has remained in touch with Eastwood-Ritchey and, according to Mark, she’s struggling with being away from her family. She’s scared, and considering the prison regularly plays the more exploitative true crime docs on television like Killer Cases (which features an episode about Eastwood-Ritchey), she doesn’t feel safe.

“Gail really has internalized the idea that she’s a monster, but when I actually showed her the film, she watched the segments of other women and she heard psychologists talk about it [denied pregnancy] for the first time,” Earnshaw said. “Because she’d never even heard anybody talk about it, she told me as soon as it was done that she felt like the film was beautiful and that she really, really, really hoped it would help other women.”