Special Delivery : ANN JILLIAN SHARES THE TRIALS OF A WOMAN WHO BORE HER DAUGHTER’S TWINS

Inside a high school courtyard, Ann Jillian and Arlette Schweitzer embrace and clutch hands like old friends.

Then Jillian, 43, and Schweitzer, the first American woman to bear a child for her daughter, engage in woman-to-woman talk, sharing memories of their pregnancies.

“Each stage of padding brings back memories,” says Jillian, who is dressed to look every bit the expectant mother for her role in “Labor of Love: The Arlette Schweitzer Story.”

They swap stories about praying in church while pregnant. At one time, Jillian recalls, she couldn’t pull herself up from the altar rail and had to crawl to the side, so her husband could help her up.

There is nothing to suggest that these two women had just met on the movie set the day before. The movie, directed by Jerry London (“Ellis Island.” “Shogun”), also stars Tracey Gold (“Growing Pains”) as Christa, Schweitzer’s daughter.

“Arlette and I had instant rapport,” says the actress (“Ellis Island,” “Mae West”).”We talked like girlfriends--half giggling and half crying.”

Schweitzer, dressed comfortably in a black warm-up suit, white turtleneck and odd-shaped black and white earrings, agrees. “If they let me choose, I couldn’t be prouder. When they told me Ann Jillian was playing my part, I squealed in delight.”

The parallels between the two women are many, beyond their deep Catholic faith. Both had children in their 40s.

“Being a mother at 42 and having a (Caesarean) section like Arlette, I understand all of it,” says Jillian. “The faith and love are the focus of the story. It became an opportunity to fix the ‘ouch,’ as Arlette calls it. Any parent knows what it is like to do anything to make a child feel better.”

Both have faced adversity.

Schweitzer lost her son, Chad, to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

In 1985, Jillian suffered breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy and chemotherapy. Later, she stunned the world by announcing her pregnancy at age 41. Her son, Andrew Joseph Murcia, was born in 1992.

“I felt in 1985 I was given back life,” she says. “Arlette felt this was a second chance to give back life after the loss of her child. To that degree, it is spiritual parallel.”

Both have strong family ties.

Jillian, who travels with her son and husband-manager Andy Murcia, says she gets separation anxiety when she is away from her young son.

“I cannot be without my guy for a long time,” she said. “I have to have a dose of him. Now, I get about an hour with him a day.”

Schweitzer, a South Dakota school librarian, also is a devoted mother and grandmother. She brought 16 family members to the movie set, including her daughter Christa Uchytil, son-in-law Kevin and the couple’s tow-haired twins.

The movie goes back to Christa’s life as a young girl when all she talked about was becoming a mother.

“When you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always said a mommy--not a teacher or a nurse,” says Schweitzer, 44.

But at 15, Christa was devastated when a doctor told her she had no uterus. “I was confused and didn’t understand it,” says Christa Uchytil, now 24. “It was hard to take. But Mom and Dad gave me hope right away. On the way home, they talked to me about medical technology growing every day. At the time, there was test tube baby Mary Louise.”

Two years later, Schweitzer took her daughter to the Mayo Clinic where they found out about vitro fertilization.

From that moment, they made courageous decision: Schweitzer would lend her uterus to her daughter after Christa married.

“This is a great movie of hope, love and inspiration,” says Jillian. “It had to do with what the human spirit has inside and what to do in a challenging time. If you apply determination, love and faith, you can do remarkable things.”

In 1991, at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic in Minneapolis, eggs were taken from Christa’s ovaries and fertilized with her husband’s sperm and then implanted in her mother’s uterus.

How did Christa feel about her mother carrying her children?

“It seemed normal to Kevin and me because I had never carried a child before,” she recalls.”I would talk with Mom on the phone about what she was eating and drinking.”

During the birth scene, Jillian got a sense memory of everything that occurred during her own delivery.

“They used real infants but didn’t tell me when they were going to (put them in the scene), she says. “It was amazing to see the tiny toes. It sent back a moment of giving love.”

Schweitzer and her daughter never had any doubts about their decision. More importantly, this family wants to give hope to other families.

“We had planned to do it for so many years that we didn’t think of this as surrogacy,” Schweitzer explains. “It was no different if Christa needed a kidney, and I donated it.”

“Labor of Love: The Arlette Schweitzer Story” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS.