Where Are My Children (1916)

Intertitles appearing in the introductory sequence tell us:

• “Behind the great portals of Eternity, the souls of little children waited to be born.”; and
• “Within the first space was the great army of ‘chance’ children. They went forth to earth in vast numbers.”; and
• “Then came those sad, ‘unwanted’ souls, that were constantly sent back. They were marked morally or physically defective and bore the sign of the serpent.”

The district attorney (large figure at right, in hat) “was a great believer in eugenics.” He says, “These poor souls are ill-born. If the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out.”	The district attorney found pleasure in the company of his sister and her children. He hid from his wife (with dog, at right) his disappointment at her childlessness, “never dreaming that it was her fault.” (The statements here that are not quotations are almost verbatim transcripts of what is stated in the film’s intertitles.)
This book results in its author facing trial. He states to the prosecutor, “I am accused of distributing indecent literature because I advocate birth regulation. The law should help instead of hinder me.”
Sample of what the prosecution considers indecent.

	The doctor knows the hardships caused by incessant birth in the slums.
Mrs. William Carlo is visited by the recognition that she will be visited by one of those souls from Eternity. The protagonist’s wife recommends that she visit a certain Dr. Malfit if Mrs. Carlo is “determined to evade motherhood.” Dr. Malfit instantly recognizes the protagonist’s wife as a familiar presence when the two women visit his office.	“One of the ‘unwanted’ ones returns, and a social butterfly is again ready for house parties.” The secretive terms by which the woman’s “ailment” was discussed, and her having been unaware of her options once pregnant, convey that abortion could not be discussed openly.
After a botched abortion claims the life of the grown daughter of his maid, the district attorney sympathizes with the girl’s grieving mother.	District Attorney Walton puts the doctor on trial. To secure his release, the doctor blackmails the district attorney’s wife into getting her husband to drop the case lest he reveal her patronage, but the wife is unable to influece her husband. A guilty verdict follows: fifteen years at hard labor. Before he can be dragged off into custody by the bailiffs, the doctor thrusts his accounts book before the prosecutor and says, “Before sitting in judgment on others, you should see to your own household.”

The district attorney does not evade facts. He opens the accounts book and discovers his wife has paid for a (then-expensive) line item listed only as “professional services.”
The district attorney confronts his wife in their home as she is surrounded by friends. He refrains from using his professional standing against them. The dialogue equivocates abortion with manslaughter, pre-empting the opposing view that there is a line separating the two, a line that could make a difference as regards legality. The women friends are indignant at his spoiling their fun by his imposing his precepts.
Now alone with his wife, he confronts her.	The intertitle tells the audience his interrogation.
Husband and wife become strangers roaming the same house. The husband grieves for “his lost children and his lost faith in the woman who should have been their mother.” The wife had actually decided earlier, upon seeing her husband’s adoration of children, that she would overcome her frilly behavior and in expression of her love to him bear him children. She never communicates this to him. Instead, she seeks children through prayer, but “having perverted Nature so often, she found herself physically unable to [achieve] motherhood.”	Husband and wife in the decades that follow imagine the ghost-like images of the children they might have raised.

Lois Weber apparently approved of birth control, this in an era when Margaret Sanger was arrested and tried for disseminating birth-control information.  Weber’s film was released the same year that Sanger opened the first birth control clinic.

Needless to say, writer-director Lois Weber detested abortion.  The film does approve of birth control, this at a time when dissemination of birth-control information was criminal.  The film depicts the trial of a man for publishing a book on birth control, and although he is found guilty by jury, the film treats him sympathetically and his prosecutors as vicious.  Abortion is a different matter in this film.  Each unborn is depicted as having a soul.  It doesn’t matter that the abortions in the film occur (apparently) so early in the pregnancies that there would not yet be enough synapses in the brain to process a thought.

Weber provides arguments both for and against abortion.  Women who abort are depicted as frivolous, none of them any more than a “social butterfly,” a victimizer of “‘unwanted’ souls that were constantly sent back”  Among the arguments in favor of abortion implied by the film, is that a woman who experiences an undesired pregnancy without recourse to abortion may commit suicide.  (This is presented within the testimony of the doctor who had described large families living in squalor; see above.)  We are shown the doctor looking down a ravine from a bridge from which we must assume a woman has jumped.  Those living outside Southern California wouldn't know this, but the bridge shown in this scene was known at the time as a suicide bridge: the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena, California.  The same filming location would be chosen by Charlie Chaplin for a scene in which Edna Purviance contemplates suicide in The Kid.  (Note: a rerelease version of The Kid omits this scene, so it may not appear in the print that you see.)

See this link to read how Universal’s floated plans to remake Where Are My Children in 1934 were shunted by the Production Code Administration in the wake of M-G-M’s Men in White.

Lois Weber during the same decade as Where Are My Children directed The Hypocrites; that film is chronicled in a separate sidebar window: “Production Code Article 7: Costume.”