Empty Cradle (1993)

I saw this movie when it was new back in 1993, when I was just a teenager. What a great movie. It stars Lori Loughlin as Jane, a woman with two children who is told her third child was stillborn due to narcotics found in her bloodstream. But she knows that's impossible because she never did drugs and the baby kicked in the car on the way to the hospital. Unfortunately, nobody believes her, not even her husband or best friend. But we find out shortly after that Jane is telling the truth: Nurse Rita Donahue (played by Kate Jackson) drugged her and stole her baby girl in an effort to get her boyfriend Frank to marry her. Then we find out Frank is married with three daughters and desperately wants a son, so Rita makes plans to steal another baby soon after. This movie is full of suspense, and it's truly shocking and disturbing to see just how far Rita will go to get what she wants. The most astounding part is that she almost gets away with it! But thankfully, the truth eventually comes out and Jane is reunited with her child. See it at any cost. It's one of Lifetime's best TV movies.

Kate Jackson is a hoot as a crazy white-trash nurse who schemes to steal babies from pregnant women so she can lure her married boyfriend into being with her and their "family." She goes from kindly nurse to psycho baby-stealer in the blink of an eye -- great job, Kate; who knew you were such a comedienne?!The serious segments with Lori Loughlin are typical Lifetime melodrama, but the over-the-top scenes with Kate and her teenage son, played by Jonah Blechman, are pure Lifetime cheese (and I mean that in a good way!) Eriq LaSalle (Dr. Peter Benton on "ER") shows up in the last 30 minutes as an inquisitive detective.Very entertaining in a campy sort of way.

I was really intrigued by this movie, it made me really realized that I should be grateful that now hospitals are now more strict with their rules when it comes to new mothers and their newborn baby. Kate Jackson played a real conniving nurse who would do anything to hold on to a man even though he was already married, it is sort of like the other Lifetime movie "Small Sacrifices", in which a woman did the impossible just to hold onto a man, which includes murder. "Empty Cradle" is a movie that makes you think about who to trust and who not to trust. It also makes great entertainment for women who love to sit around and watch good entertaining and suspenseful movies.

Kate Jackson plays a nurse from hell who, determined to hold onto her detestable boyfriend Frank, and after months faking pregnancy with a pillow, steals another woman's baby. Since Frank (who's married, by the way, and lives with his wife) wanted a boy, and the stolen baby is a girl, she sets her sights on another mother. This leads to a gruesome murder. That part of the story foreshadows a real-life incident that took place just recently, when a woman was murdered and her fetus torn from her body.The main focus of the story, though, is on the bereft mother of the girl baby, played by Lori Loughlin, who knows darn well her baby wasn't stillborn and also knows that the assertion of the hospital (thanks to a little computer touch-up by Jackson) that she was on drugs isn't true either. Loughlin risks her marriage and takes a lot of criticism in an attempt to find out what happened to her baby.This isn't an unusual story - in TV movies, women have been stealing other women's babies for years. This is still an interesting film where one truly empathizes with Loughlin, wants to see her vindicated, and can't get over how completely nuts Jackson is. Kate Jackson has always been a good actress, and she won't disappoint you in this. Loughlin is poignant as the determined mother. Look for Eriq LaSalle before ER as a police detective.