page_title: Where Are My Children?
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: Where Are My Children? / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: Advertisement in The Moving Picture World for the American drama film Where Are My Children? (1916).
context_page_description: Where Are My Children? is a 1916 American silent drama film directed by Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber and stars Tyrone Power Sr, Juan de la Cruz, Helen Riaume, Marie Walcamp, Cora Drew, A.D. Blake, Rene Rogers, William Haben and C. Norman Hammond.
  The film tells the story of a district attorney who, while prosecuting a doctor for illegal abortions, finds out that society people, including his wife, used the doctor's services.
context_section_description: The film was inspired by the obscenity case of Margaret Sanger in New York. It stands as one of the best surviving examples of Lois Weber's social problem films.
  Eugenics and family planning are discussed didactically in the film, and examples of desirable or undesirable children (the results of good or bad breeding respectively) are shown.
  While the film presents an argument for birth control, it takes a firm stance against abortion, portraying the wealthy women as procuring abortions on a whim when pregnancy threatens to interfere with their social lives. According to some critics, the film also portrays abortion inaccurately, suggesting that it is inherently harmful to patients both physically and mentally. At the time Weber made the film, 'back alley' and 'illegal' abortions were prevalent and quite often resulted in destroying women's ability to have future children. It is left clear at the film's end Mrs. Walton can no longer have children because her body is damaged by a long-term overindulgence in abortions.
caption: Advertisement
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