"Guided by the narrative of her mother's tragic loss of a son years earlier, Mira Ptacin confronts an unexpected pregnancy with a child who has no chance of survival outside the womb. At age twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she soon embraced the pregnancy and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed birth defects that would give the child no chance of survival outside...

The premiere episode sets the stage for the intense and emotional stories to come. Dr. Scott Adzick, Surgeon-in-Chief at the elite Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a pioneer of fetal surgery, explains his own conviction: if you can get to babies earlier, while they are still inside their mothers, you can stop some of the damage of birth defects before it is too late..

This documentary directly challenges the claim of the nuclear industry and the government that "no one died" from the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plan in 1979, America's worst nuclear disaster.. Through the testimony of area residents and scientists, the documentary represents compelling evidence that cancer deaths and birth defects increased in the area surrounding the Pennsylvania plant.. The film reveals that the utility...

Step inside the groundbreaking medical frontier that is fetal surgery with Twice Born, a gripping PBS mini-series that takes an intimate, inside look at the Special Delivery Unit at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where rare surgeries are done on babies still inside their mothers’ wombs.. With exclusive access to the elite unit, (where the production crew was embedded for 15 months), you’ll live with the expecting parents who all face...

"John is a savage, but a happy, amenable savage.". –1950’s newsreel footage of Marshall Islanders. Featuring recently declassified U.S. government documents, survivor testimony, and unseen archival footage, Nuclear Savage uncovers one of the most troubling chapters in modern American history: how Marshall islanders, considered an uncivilized culture, were deliberately used as human guinea pigs to study the effects of nuclear fallout on human beings....

"When the application for a new sedative called Kevadon--commonly known as thalidomide--landed on Frances Kelsey's desk at the FDA in 1960, it seemed destined to sail through the review process. The drug, billed as entirely risk-free, was already being sold in forty-six countries. But when Kelsey learned that the drug caused terrible birth defects, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought Merrell, the drug's American manufacturer,...

Carmen Durán works the graveyard shift in one of Tijuana's 800 maquiladoras; she is one of six million women around the world who labor for poverty wages in the factories of transnational corporations. After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a dirt-floor shack she built out of cast-off garage doors from the U.S., in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. She suffers from on-the-job kidney damage and lead poisoning...