By DEXTER DUGGAN
The passage of time shows that a century-old silent movie intended to promote the availability of artificial contraception as the preferable alternative to abortion was wrong in its prognostication.
As pro-life champions like the late sociologist Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, argued in the latter twentieth century, permissive contraception created the expectation that there’s a “right” to avoid pregnancy, and that when fallible contraception failed, permissive abortion was demanded as the backup.
In turn, when permissive abortion is at hand — and its dangers are laughed off by pro-abortion media — there’s less incentive to use artificial contraception diligently in the first place.
Longtime California pro-life activist and physicist Albin Rhomberg recently called attention to the 1916 silent film Where Are My Children? It had major credentials of the time behind it, like actor Tyrone Power Sr. and the Universal Film Manufacturing Co., which was to become Universal Studios.
The film, lasting just over an hour, began with a notice that birth control was being generally discussed in society. If children were to see the film when accompanied by adults, the notice said, “It will do them an immeasurable amount of good.”
A Wikipedia description of the film says that after the trial of the character of abortionist Dr. Herman Malfit, District Attorney Richard Walton (Power) examines the records of Malfit and realizes that his own wife, Edith, and her friends have been going to him.
The story line is that Edith had the abortions so her busy social life wouldn’t be interrupted.
Finding the friends lunching with Edith, Wikipedia says, Walton banishes them, “saying ‘I should bring you to trial for manslaughter!’ and confronts Edith with the cry, ‘Where are my children?’ She is overcome with remorse. As the years pass, the couple must contend with a lonely, childless life, full of longing for the family they might have had.”
Rhomberg emailed his contacts about the film: “The theology presented in this silent film of babies being summoned from heaven, unwanted, and then ‘returned’ to heaven, is bizarre, but the film is a dramatic presentation of the evils of the Planned Parenthood selfish society.
“The special effects at the ending, where the lonely, aging, childless district attorney and his wife, sitting alone in front of their elegant fireplace, are visited by their aborted ‘ghost’ daughter and two sons, as children and then again as adults, is quite a moving, powerful end of the movie,” Rhomberg added.
However, another theme in the movie was that artificial contraception was a desirable social advance, as advocated by the character of Dr. Homer, who “has been arrested for distributing ‘indecent’ birth-control literature. On the stand, Dr. Homer makes a strong case for legalizing contraception,” Wikipedia says.
The Embryo Project Encyclopedia website says the film’s director Lois Weber “encourages contraceptives as a means of family planning, but advocates against abortions. Where Are My Children? is one of the first films to discuss birth control and family planning, and it is among the first to push against motion-picture censorship of contraception and family planning in cinema.”
The artificial-contraception crusader and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger shared in the eugenics thinking of the time, favoring what its proponents called more children from the fit and fewer from the unfit.
When Sanger advocated creating “a race of thoroughbreds,” she was talking about how to breed people, not horses.
The Embryo Project Encyclopedia says the film’s district attorney is depicted as sad because he lacks the children he wants, “but the scene also implies that Walton wants children as a means to pass down his and his wife’s supposedly superior physical and social traits. The film depicts Walton and his wife as an example of an ideal eugenic relationship because both are white and are upper class and thus have supposedly superior traits.”
In his email about the film, pro-life activist Rhomberg hoped there could be a major film production on the disastrous results of the anti-child crusade.
The outcome has been, he said, that “the European and formerly Christian nations are dying as the result of the rejection of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae,” seen in “the deadly influence and acceptance of Planned Parenthood’s evil message and corruption of society, and young people with ‘birth control’ and mass prenatal murder.”
Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer on April 26: “Rational people once regarded the deliberate ending of a pregnancy as the killing of a human life. No one argued that ending a pregnancy was to prevent a live birth. Even in the early days of Hollywood that belief was accepted, but then Margaret Sanger and the women’s-rights crowd gained attention and support and the whole scene changed.
“When media supported that position and politics got involved, abortion became ‘accepted’ and the issue became a woman’s right to choose and her control over her own body,” Simpson said. “Roe v. Wade gave the issue more power, and here we are: Preborn children are nonentities, with no rights and, in the eyes of the law and liberals, they don’t exist.
“Well, they do exist but the mother can kill them and it’s all legal,” she said. “Legal, perhaps. But moral? Not on your life.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on April 28 that “Hollywood has long been in the grip of whatever has constituted America’s radical left, and as the left has shifted further left in terms of cultural decay, ideological shifts, and increasingly radical concepts that they want to mainstream, Hollywood has led the way.
“There are exceptions to this norm, but there are few centrist or right-of-center production companies making movies anymore,” Querard added.
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