There’s a moment in Maite Alberdi’s new documentary A Child of My Own where the full weight of what happened settles over you. It’s not a dramatic reenactment or a shocking reveal. It’s something quieter—a woman describing the moment she realized her lie had grown too large to contain. She’d told her family she was pregnant. She’d told her husband she was pregnant. She’d gained weight, prepared a nursery, picked out a name. But there was no baby. There never had been. And as the due date approached, she found herself trapped in a deception that could only end one way: with her walking into a hospital and stealing someone else’s child.
The documentary, which just arrived on Netflix, explores one of the most disturbing criminal cases in recent Mexican history. It’s not a whodunit. The facts are known. What Alberdi is interested in is the why—the desperate psychology that drives a woman who has suffered multiple miscarriages to construct an elaborate fiction and then commit an irreversible act to maintain it. The film uses interviews, archival footage, and some dramatized recreations to piece together the story of Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza, a 26-year-old hospital worker who stole a newborn baby from the maternity ward where she was employed.
A Child of My Own: The Real Case on Netflix Documentary
The events took place in Mexico in 2009. Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza worked as an administrative employee at the General Hospital in Mexico City. She had been trying to become a mother for years, but each pregnancy ended in loss. The documentary suggests these repeated miscarriages were devastating—not just emotionally, but socially. She was under pressure to have a child. Her family expected it. Her husband expected it. And after her most recent loss, she made a decision that would unravel her life: she told everyone she was still pregnant.
For months, she maintained the fiction. She gained weight. She prepared for the baby’s arrival. She told her family the birth would happen on June 17. And when that day arrived, she went to the hospital where she worked—a place where no one would question her presence—and walked into the obstetrics and gynecology area. Minutes before 7:00 PM, she took a newborn girl from one of the nurseries, hid her inside a paper bag, and tried to leave.
The alarm was raised almost immediately. Security footage revealed that the baby had been taken by a hospital employee. Police searched Marín’s home and phone records, which led them to a hotel in the east of Mexico City. The next morning, they found the healthy baby in room 449 of the Hollywood hotel, where Alejandra and her husband were also located. The girl was returned to her parents. The case became national news.
The Lies That Followed
What makes the story so disturbing isn’t just the theft itself. It’s the layers of deception that surrounded it. During the investigation, it emerged that Marín had hidden her previous miscarriages from her family. No one knew the most recent pregnancy was false. She had been planning the theft for months—there was already a prepared room in her house, fully furnished and waiting for a baby that didn’t exist.
When questioned, Marín claimed her husband had nothing to do with the theft. She also offered a different story: she said she had met the baby’s mother months earlier and that the woman had agreed to give her the child. According to Marín, the mother was a single woman who already had another daughter and couldn’t raise a second baby. She claimed the transfer was consensual.
The baby’s mother, Mayra, denied all of this. Her account, which she shares in the documentary, is very different. She says she met Alejandra the day her baby was born. Marín entered her hospital room posing as a hospital worker conducting surveys. She asked Mayra questions about her life, about the baby’s father, about her relationship—questions that seemed routine but were actually gathering information Marín would later use to construct her story. Mayra was running a high fever at the time. She was taken to bathe, and when she returned, her baby was gone.
The baby’s father appeared in the media, begging for the child’s return. The evidence, meanwhile, contradicted Marín’s version of events. Mayra had received her prenatal care at a different hospital and only arrived at the General Hospital at the end of her pregnancy. There was no months-long relationship, no agreement, no consensual transfer. There was just a woman who saw an opportunity and took it.
The Sentence and Its Aftermath
Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza was convicted and sentenced to 13 years, 3 months, and 25 days in prison. Her husband, Arturo Calderón Gamiño, was arrested when the baby was found and spent two and a half years in custody awaiting trial. He was eventually acquitted. The court determined he had nothing to do with the theft—he believed the baby was his, because that’s what his wife had told him. He was as deceived as everyone else.
Marín completed her sentence in 2023 and is now free. Alberdi interviewed her while she was still incarcerated, and those interviews form the emotional core of the documentary. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who still seems to be trying to understand what she did—not excusing it, but explaining how the pressure to become a mother, combined with the trauma of repeated loss, created a situation where a lie seemed like the only way forward.
The Larger Pattern
A Child of My Own arrives on Netflix just weeks after the platform released Maternal Instinct, another documentary about a similar case. That film explored the story of a woman who committed an even more violent act in pursuit of motherhood. The proximity of the two releases is deliberate. Netflix is clearly interested in examining the phenomenon of women who cross terrible lines in their desperation to have children—not to excuse their crimes, but to understand the forces that drive them.
It’s a difficult subject. The natural response to a story like this is horror and anger. Someone stole a baby. Someone traumatized a new mother. Someone built an elaborate fiction that victimized an entire family. And yet the documentary refuses to reduce its subject to a monster. Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza is guilty. She served her sentence. But she’s also a woman who suffered something that broke her in ways she couldn’t process, and the film asks us to hold both truths at once.
The miscarriage that preceded the theft wasn’t her first. Each loss compounded the grief, and the pressure from her family and her culture to produce a child made that grief impossible to express. She couldn’t admit the pregnancy had failed because admitting it meant failing as a woman, as a wife, as a daughter. So she pretended. And the pretending worked until it didn’t, and then she did something unforgivable.
Where the Documentary Leaves You
Alberdi’s film doesn’t end with a neat resolution. Marín is free now, living with the consequences of her actions in ways that are less visible than prison bars but no less real. Mayra and her family got their baby back, but the trauma of those hours when she was missing—and the violation of having a stranger pose as a caregiver while gathering information to steal her child—doesn’t just disappear. The documentary acknowledges this without lingering on it. Some wounds don’t close.
The case remains one of the most shocking in recent Mexican history, not because the crime was so elaborate, but because it was so human. A woman wanted a baby. She couldn’t have one. She lied about it. And then she did something monstrous. A Child of My Own doesn’t ask us to forgive her. It asks us to look at what happened and understand that even the worst acts have origins, that desperation can warp a person into someone they never intended to become. Whether that understanding is enough—whether it should be enough—is left for the viewer to decide. The documentary presents the facts, the interviews, the archival footage. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. It just shows you what happened, and lets the horror of it speak for itself.