Roma presents Cleo's stillbirth as foreordained.

Not because of untreated preeclampsia or infection or placental insufficiency—conditions that appear nowhere in the film—but because she is a domestic worker in 1970s Mexico City.

The camera doesn't linger on medical incompetence. It doesn't show her denied care, turned away, deprioritized. Instead Cuarón constructs a visual and narrative logic where her body's failure becomes interchangeable with her social position. She drowns at the beach while watching her employers' children swim. She loses her pregnancy in a movie theater during a riot. The specific cause never matters. What matters is that she is Cleo.

This is not realism about mid-century obstetrics—it's a specific ideological choice about who gets to have treatable problems. The 1970 Mexican maternal mortality rate was roughly 100 per 100,000 live births, concentrated almost entirely among poor and Indigenous women. That gap didn't exist because poverty causes biological destiny. It existed because public hospitals were underfunded, rural clinics didn't exist, and obstetric care was rationed by class. These are policy problems with policy solutions. Roma achieves its emotional power precisely by erasing this framework.

What matters is that she is Cleo.

The film makes us complicit in the same framing that killed Cleo's real-world counterparts: that some women's losses are tragedies of circumstance rather than evidence of failure. We leave the theater moved. We don't leave it demanding obstetric infrastructure investment in marginalized regions. That's not a documentary limitation. That's a choice about which stories the camera is allowed to see.