Rita Donahue (Kate Jackson) will do anything to have a baby. Two women with the same goal: They are both trying to create a family. But while Jane Morgan (Lori Loughlin) waits patiently for the birth of her third child, Rita Donahue obtains her babies in the most cruel way possible. She steals them. This extraordinary, heart-wrenching story - inspired by an actual event - traces how Rita Donahue, a nurse at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, operates a devious and elaborate scam to steal babies, faking both the deaths of perfectly healthy infants and her own pregnancies to get what she wants. One of the victims is Jane Morgan a young mother struggling to keep her family together. After a normal pregnancy, Jane refuses to believe the hospitals explanation for the tragic "death" of her newborn baby and sets out on a desperate, emotional search to track down the monster who has committed the ultimate evil of stealing her child

This made-for-television thriller tells the story of an unstable woman who goes to bizarre lengths to keep her drifting lover. Kate Jackson stars as Rita Donohue, a nurse who believes that she can re-ignite her disinterested lover's passion by having a child. Unable to have a child of her own, Rita plots to snatch an infant from her hospital's maternity ward to later pass off as her own. She feigns a pregnancy, switches records on a stillborn and healthy child, and then steals a baby from new mother Jane Morgan (Lori Loughlin) in order to support her charade. The plan goes sour though, when Jane refuses to accept the hospital's claim that her child died, and she investigates the unsettling clues on her own.

Empty Cradle," a quintessential title among the diapered dramas in the hamper this season, pushes baby snatching to the clinical max.
But the fear Rebecca Soladay's script really touches is to cast a dark net over the given safety a pregnant woman feels when she enters a delivery room.

Talk about untapping basic anxieties and worst-case scenarios.

In a sharp and effective departure, Kate Jackson plays a demented obstetrics nurse with a pregnancy fetish (based on the true-life case of convicted nurse Norma Armistead).
In a desperate effort to hold onto her lover (a callow Don Yello), Jackson's nurse pads her tummy with pillows and fakes giving birth by drugging a woman in the throes of real labor in the hospital where the crazed nurse works. She replaces the healthy newborn with a dead, premature fetus and waltzes home to show off her new baby girl.
But there's a double catch. Her unknowing lover wants a boy, not a daughter! And the distraught real mom (Lori Loughlin, by now freaking out) starts an investigation that ultimately nails the twisted nurse only because she was reckless enough to murder another pregnant woman for her male fetus.
Jackson, with a bravura role, turns in a multidimensional and textured performance -- complete with wiry demeanor, feverish eyes and jolts of scary temper.
By contrast, Loughlin lends the show, directed by Paul Schneider, its requisite soft, matronly balance and all-purpose sympathy factor. Supporting player Jona Blechman, as Jackson's squirrelly accomplice of a teenage son, embroiders the edges of one of the more dysfunctional families imaginable.