TV REVIEW : ‘Anissa Ayala Story’ Relives Unique Parent-Child Tale

It’s perhaps natural to approach the fact-based “For the Love of My Child: The Anissa Ayala Story” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) with trepidation. TV movies about life-threatening illnesses can be maddeningly over-dramatic and maudlin affairs.

Fortunately, the mostly engaging “For the Love of My Child” manages to operate on a relatively even emotional keel. Written and directed with understanding and care, it explores the many, and sometimes conflicting, feelings that swirl around a family when one of its members is stricken with a potentially deadly disease.

The much publicized story of Anissa Ayala (Teresa DiSpina) certainly contains substantial built-in drama. At the age of 16, the Walnut, Calif., teen-ager is diagnosed with leukemia. When a search fails to turn up a suitable donor for a bone marrow transplant, her parents decide to conceive another child in the hope that it will provide a suitable match.

Abe and Mary Ayala’s successful quest to save their daughter’s life stirred a nationwide debate over the morality of creating one life in order to save another. But “For the Love of My Child” makes an eloquent argument that the Ayalas deeply valued the lives of both Anissa and their baby, Marissa.

*

Priscilla Lopez and Tony Perez bring an ingratiating warmth to their roles of the parents, conveying their characters’ fears and hopes in a manner that is more often realistic than melodramatic.

“For the Love of My Child” is far more moving than Sunday night’s CBS movie, “Labor of Love: The Arlette Schweitzer Story,” which also dealt with parental love and determination in its story of the first woman in the United States to bear her daughter’s children. “Labor of Love” lacked the intrinsic drama and sense of humanity of “For the Love of My Child.”