TV Reviews : ‘Desperate Choices’: A Family Divided

A teen-age girl’s need for a bone marrow transplant and her mother’s refusal to allow a younger brother to be the donor hurtles a family to the brink of destruction in “Desperate Choices: To Save My Child” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39).

The fictional story, inspired by a real-life court case, dramatizes one of the most agonizing decisions a family could face: whether to permit a minor, at some risk to his own health, to serve as a donor for a sister who will die without her little brother’s bone marrow.

Rather than merely another TV saga about a fatal disease, the script by Sandra Jennings and Maggie Kleinman uses a life-threatening ailment--the leukemia wasting away the life of a 15-year-old girl (the credible and likable Reese Witherspoon)--to expose a mother and father’s deepest, most selfish feelings. Bruce Davison and Joanna Kerns portray the embattled parents.

Complicating their struggle is the fact that the ailing girl is the father’s daughter by a previous marriage. Only the couple’s natural child (Joseph Mazzello) tests positive as an acceptable match.

Offscreen, Kerns and Davison took this subject to heart. They became volunteer donors for the National Marrow Donor Program, which was initiated five years ago to try to match unrelated donors to the more than 16,000 Americans who are diagnosed each year with fatal blood diseases. In the TV movie, we hear that the odds of the girl marrow-matching with someone outside her family are 1 in 20,000.