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Where Are My Children?, the 1916 Lois Weber silent medical doctor abortion legal melodrama ("Sensational - powerful - dignified and a distinct revelation to all the world"; about a successful doctor who sends poor patients to have abortions, but he is against them for "upper class" people, because he believes in eugenics, but he doesn't know that his own wife has been having abortions, because she likes her life without children, but late in the movie, he discovers her terrible secret) starring Tyrone Power Sr. (billed as "featuring the great American actor Tyrone Power"), Helen Riaume (Power's real life wife, but she was not billed as such, which is pretty surprising), Marie Walcamp, Cora Drew, and Rena Rogers. Note that far and away the two most famous movies from 1916 are D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" and Thomas Ince's "Civilization", but this movie deserves to be just as well remembered! First off, it was directed by Lois Weber, who was a giant of early cinema, the only woman to make major Hollywood movies of note in the mid 1910s. The movie dealt with what is referred to as "birth control", but it actually was used at that time to refer to abortion. It was loosely inspired by a real life case involving Margaret Sanger, a major early birth control advocate, who was put on trial because a woman had an abortion after receiving a leaflet about it from Sanger! But this movie goes far beyond that. It explores the then popular concept of "eugenics", which advocated that wealthy people should have as many children as possible, both because they could afford it, and because it would ensure that their genes would be passed on, while poor or "inferior" people should not only not have many children at all, but they should also pursue abortions when they became accidentally pregnant, both because they could not afford having children, but also because they had "inferior" genes. This "theory" became completely discredited after it was advocated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. There were some exploitation movies dealing with abortion in the 1930s to 1950s, but there has not been another serious Hollywood movie about abortion (trying to present both sides of the issue evenly) since this movie, nearly a century ago, and given the huge division of feelings on both sides of the issue, it is unlikely there will be another one any time soon. Of particular note in this movie is that Weber has scenes of ghostly babies in Heaven waiting to be born, and the movie closes with a powerful scene of the doctor and his wife in their later years, childless, but surrounded by the ghostly souls of the babies they never had! This is surely one of the most important early silent movies for all of the above reasons, but perhaps it is because of its controversial nature that it is little talked about today (certainly, a similar situation exists with 1915's "The Birth of a Nation").
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Important Added Info: Note that we have never before auctioned this herald! Note that in the case of a movie like this, one would wonder if the herald could possibly be from a re-release, but the date on the cover "Friday Nov. 10" is from 1916, so we know that this is from the very first release of this movie (and amazingly, the price of a ticket was 25 cents and 50 cents, which was an awful lot for 1916!).

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