Reproduction as a horror film

In 1930 the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) was the branch of the Hays Office tasked with enforcing the Production Code. The SRC advised studios on how to alter their scripts so that they met the standards of the Production Code. The SRC, however, could not force studios to accept their suggestions. This meant that despite their agreement to abide by the Production Code, studios frequently ignored the SRC's recommendations in the early 1930s.Footnote ¹⁷ The director of the Hays Office at this time, Colonel Jason Joy, took a particularly lenient approach to the Production Code, which he viewed as a flexible set of guidelines rather than a hard and fast set of rules. Confusingly, the period between 1930, when the Production Code was adopted but laxly enforced, and 1934 is referred to as the ‘pre-Code’ period.

From the perspective of religious protestors, the Hays Office's failure to rigorously enforce the Production Code meant that movies were just as morally problematic as they had been before its adoption. In response, Will Hays created the Production Code Administration (PCA) as a way to curtail calls by religious groups for a government censorship organization.Footnote ¹⁸ This pressure also led the Catholic Church to form its own censorship organization, the Catholic Legion of Decency, in 1933.Footnote ¹⁹ The tough-minded Catholic Joseph Breen took over as director of the PCA in 1934. Although the Catholic Church was not the only religious voice in these organizations it certainly had an immense influence.Footnote ²⁰ Breen's Catholicism informed his censorship throughout the time that he ran the PCA from 1934 until 1954 and the Legion of Decency explicitly approached movie narratives through the lens of Catholic theology.Footnote ²¹ Studios’ agreement not to release any films without the PCA's seal of approval gave Breen the power he needed to force studios to alter their scripts if they did not meet the standards of the Production Code.Footnote ²² As such, the PCA and the Legion of Decency exerted significant influence over the types of story studios could tell about pregnancy and childbirth.

Catholics considered motherhood to be a sacred state of grace that all women should strive for.Footnote ²³ Therefore censors from both the PCA and the Legion of Decency were sensitive to any cinematic portrayals of pregnancy and childbirth that could discourage women from embracing motherhood. Responses to the film Life Begins (1932) were particularly influential on the ways the SRC, and its successor, the PCA, subsequently handled depictions of pregnancy and childbirth.Footnote ²⁴ The SRC told Warner Brothers from the outset that they did not think any film based on the play Birth would be approvable under the Production Code because the story was set entirely within a maternity ward. They warned the studio that even if they could produce an acceptable film it was likely to face severe censorship from local, state and international censor boards.Footnote ²⁵ One SRC censor wanted to prohibit any adaptation of the play because ‘women sentimentalize over young motherhood’ and he did not want their idealized vision of motherhood sullied by overt discussions about the reality of pregnancy and childbirth.Footnote ²⁶ For this censor, mythic versions of motherhood were acceptable, but he believed that women did not want to see the actuality of motherhood portrayed realistically on motion-picture screens. But another censor convinced SRC director Jason Joy that the play's message about the wonders of motherhood made a film version desirable despite potential issues over direct discussions of pregnancy and childbirth.Footnote ²⁷

Joy told Will Hays that he considered the completed film to be ‘experimental’ because Life Begins provided the SRC an opportunity to see if regional censors would allow cinematic depictions of pregnancy and childbirth if the regional censors felt that the film was providing important moral guidance for audiences. Unfortunately for Joy, his experiment was a complete failure. A large number of local, state and international censor boards heavily edited the film or banned it completely, as did the British Board of Film Censorship (BBFC) in the UK.Footnote ²⁸ For these censor groups, there was no reason to show the realities of pregnancy and childbirth on movie screens no matter how morally inspiring the film's message might be. The response to this film set the tone for how the SRC (and its 1934 successor the PCA) subsequently approached scripts incorporating pregnancy and childbirth. Their new policy was that pregnancy was not an appropriate subject for cinema, but if it had to be included in a film it was to be mentioned briefly and then relegated to the background.Footnote ²⁹ From the PCA's perspective, the only morally appropriate stories about motherhood were narratives rooted in fantasy where pregnancy did not change women's bodies, childbirth was not painful or dangerous, and every woman desperately wanted a baby. Their restrictive policy did not change until the 1950s.

The PCA's approach of minimizing pregnancy on screen meant that scripts could not include any reminders that pregnancy was a biological process. This meant that studios were prevented from visualizing any external physical changes a woman's body went through during pregnancy. They cautioned the producers of Black Market Babies (1946), for example, that there should be no artificial ‘padding’ of the women in the film to make them look pregnant.Footnote ³⁰ This restriction was problematic for a visual medium like film. The inability to even show a pregnant woman's abdominal expansion meant that most pregnant women in films between 1930 and the 1950s looked as trim as your average Hollywood actress.Footnote ³¹ The PCA also policed dialogue about the ways women's bodies changed during pregnancy. The censors found a line ‘about putting on weight and eating pickles’ in the script for Paid in Full (1950) to be problematic because it implied pregnancy's impact on a woman's body. These concerns about the physical manifestations of pregnancy were not merely because the PCA wanted pregnancy relegated to the background. They also believed that depictions of these physical changes would distress young women and might dissuade them from having babies.

The PCA believed that, even more than pregnancy's accompanying physical changes, the pain of childbirth would deter young women from procreation, so they were vigilant in removing from scripts any indications that childbirth might be a painful experience. One of the major issues that Breen had with the script for Dr. Monica (1934) was its explicit ‘talk about the “dangers” of motherhood’.Footnote ³² For example, he told the studio to remove a ‘discussion between Dr. Monica and the nurse, in which it is indicated that Mary is “scared to death” at the idea of impending childbirth’.Footnote ³³ Breen's explanation as to why dialogue like this was dangerous sums up the PCA's philosophy concerning cinematic presentations of childbirth: ‘Audiences have generally come to resent scenes on the screen which present motherhood as a terrifying prospect to the youth of the country’. But even benign phrases like ‘she's going to have a baby’ were routinely cut by the PCA because they were reminders that having babies was a process and that this process involved pain. For the film Outcast (1937) they suggested that the studio replace the phrase ‘she's having a baby’ with the phrase ‘when her baby is born’.Footnote ³⁴ From their perspective the first phrase was problematic because it connoted the action of childbirth while the second passive phrase was acceptable because it was just a descriptor.

Subtle dialogue was a problem for the PCA, but overt dialogue, explicit sounds and visual depictions of the pain of childbirth were even bigger concerns. The PCA's negotiations over the script for A Child Is Born (1940) are indicative of their approach to minimizing realistic portrayals of childbirth that they believed would distress young women.Footnote ³⁵ The PCA tried to remove any indication from this film that childbirth was a painful process. This included removing specific lines of dialogue indicating the physical difficulties of childbirth, including ‘you're the one that'll be shrieking in pain’ and ‘they get easier all the time’.Footnote ³⁶ But it also included lines of dialogue in which women questioned the necessity of having children, such as, ‘Do I have to have them?’ In addition, the PCA recommend removing the sounds of childbirth, including the ‘offstage screams’ of a woman in labour. They even policed stage directions for the actors, such as telling the studio to ‘please omit the action of Grace clutching her side, as this will undoubtedly be suggestive of labor pains’.

Despite the PCA's attempts to minimize elements that might make childbirth seem distressing in A Child Is Born, numerous regional censor boards still heavily edited or banned the film because they believed it would frighten women away from pursuing motherhood. British Columbia, for example, rejected the film because ‘[t]he showing of this picture would have the effect of creating a fear in the minds of expectant mothers’.Footnote ³⁷ Part of this response was due to the fact that the studio ignored a number of the PCA's recommendations. Breen made sure to point this out to the studio when he informed them that the BBFC's severe editing of their film in the UK could have been avoided if they had taken his advice.Footnote ³⁸ The BBFC, in fact, had been particularly harsh on the film. For them the film's depictions of childbirth were so disturbing and frightening that they gave it a ‘horrific’ classification, which meant that a film celebrating the wonders of motherhood could only be seen by adults over eighteen.Footnote ³⁹ From the BBFC's perspective the realities of pregnancy and childbirth were just as disturbing as the monsters in genuine horror films like Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931).

Childbirth was not only painful; it could also be a dangerous activity for both mother and child. Maternal mortality was in decline by the 1930s, the result of rising living standards, antibiotics and blood transfusion services.Footnote ⁴⁰ But censorship organizations remained leery of film narratives calling attention to the dangers of childbirth. The PCA's response to an expectant mother's utterance of the words ‘women die …’ in the script for The Secret of Dr. Kildare (1939) was typical of their approach to this subject. For them this dialogue was unacceptable because ‘it overemphasizes the danger of pregnancy’.Footnote ⁴¹ Even in the 1950s, foetal mortality remained a constant real-life concern for expectant mothers.Footnote ⁴² As Breen explained, the PCA took a harsh stand against any depictions of miscarriage: ‘With regard to the questions of miscarriage: we simply do not allow such discussions, because, in our judgment – and the studios have unfailingly agreed with us – such discussions are totally unfit for presentation before mixed audiences in theatres.’Footnote ⁴³ The PCA ultimately relaxed its stance on miscarriage in the mid-1940s when they were convinced that, if handled carefully, it could provide a legitimate plot point. In the first half of the century, pain-relieving drugs had transformed the experience of childbirth.Footnote ⁴⁴ These changes led the PCA to soften their general approach to depictions of pregnant women and discussions about childbirth in movies.

Childbirth as entertainment or education?

One aspect of human reproduction that the PCA and the Legion of Decency were consistently reluctant to allow was explicit visual depiction of childbirth. The Production Code unambiguously prohibited explicit depictions of childbirth: ‘Scenes of actual childbirth, in fact or in silhouette, are never to be presented’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Not only might childbirth scenes frighten potential mothers, but also the PCA considered the act of childbirth to be an intensely private moment not suitable for the immersive medium of cinema. Many moral reformers, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, also felt that portrayals of childbirth were disrespectful to the sanctity of motherhood. They believed that allowing men to watch such a private female act jeopardized their respect for women's purity as mothers.Footnote ⁴⁶ There was also a concern that childbirth scenes were ‘indecent’ because they might show the woman's genitals. The PCA cautioned studios that they were best off handling childbirth scenes by ‘suggestion’ rather than through visuals. Any studio ignoring this warning risked having the PCA reject their finished film.

Despite the PCA's restriction, filmmakers still frequently tried to include scenes of childbirth in their entertainment films. In the case of The Birth of a Baby (1938) the entire narrative centred on discussions of childbirth and an actual childbirth was the film's defining scene.Footnote ⁴⁷ Knowing that they would not be able to garner a PCA seal for their film, the producers appealed directly to the various local, city and state censor boards for approval to show the film in mainstream theatres. The film was banned in New York state with a 1939 court ruling that scenes of childbirth were ‘indecent when presented to patrons of public entertainment’.Footnote ⁴⁸ But the film was screened in several other places, including Minnesota. The success of these screenings in PCA-affiliated theatres created a major challenge to the PCA's authority. Even though the Production Code forbade portrayals of childbirth, the PCA could not claim that the topic itself was inherently immoral. In addition, too many medical groups had praised this particular film for Breen to risk a public argument with theatre owners over their screenings.

But Breen had to do something otherwise theatres would interpret the PCA's inaction as justification for showing other films that went against the Production Code but were not necessarily immoral. The PCA solved this issue by constructing an official division between films that were appropriate for ‘entertainment’ and those that were ‘educational’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Film scholar Benjamin Strassfeld shows how this division was a clever means by which the PCA could maintain its control over exhibition.Footnote ⁵⁰ The distinction between entertainment and education led to the physical segregation of the places where these two types of film could be shown. This separation of exhibition spaces meant that rather than having to judge the morality of a film itself, the PCA could now judge the morality of the film's exhibition context. Films that the PCA deemed ‘educational’ could not be screened in mainstream theatres and instead could only be shown in churches, schools and lecture halls. In one exhibition context childbirth was exploitative and immoral, but in another theatre space the topic was uplifting and moral.

The PCA argued that a film's story was never harmed by the removal of childbirth scenes. If a plot required the birth of a child then they felt it was adequate to just mention that a baby had been born. The case of Forgotten Village (1941) demonstrates how the censors came to this conclusion because they embraced a simplistic conception of motion pictures as merely linear stories with easily understandable narratives. The film focuses on a rural Mexican village where the government hopes that modern medicine will replace a native herb doctor. The PCA judged the finished film to be satisfactory except for a lengthy childbirth scene that they requested be removed before approval. According to Breen this should have been an easy decision for the studio because removing these scenes did not hurt the film's story in any way: ‘It is our considered unanimous judgment, here, that the eliminations made to bring this picture within the provisions of the Production Code do not, in any way, seriously detract from the general importance and value of this film’.Footnote ⁵¹ The studio, however, disagreed with Breen's artistic assessment concerning the significance of this scene for the film. So they decided to release the film without the PCA's approval, knowing that the film might run into censorship issues with regional censor boards; which it did.

The New York censor board, for example, banned the film because of the inclusion of this childbirth scene. The film's distributor protested to the State Board of Regents about the censor board's verdict. The Board of Regents lifted the ban and allowed the uncut film to be shown in New York. Famed New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther took the Board of Regents’ decision as a ‘cause for rejoicing’.Footnote ⁵² Unlike Breen and the PCA, who considered the scene to be inessential, Crowther believed that ‘a sustention of the censors’ prudish orders would have desecrated a work of pictorial art’. Crowther considered the childbirth scene essential because it contributed to the film's thematic exploration of ‘the human cycle of birth, daily toil and the inexorable mystery of death’. But for the censors the film was merely the story of a teacher helping to bring modern medicine to a rural village. From their perspective it was an unpleasant scene that was entirely unnecessary for audiences to understand this simple plot.

The PCA may have excluded explicit depictions of childbirth from mainstream films, but from the studios’ standpoint the notion of what constituted an ‘actual’ depiction of childbirth was still contentious in the 1950s. In the case of Paid in Full (1950), for example, the PCA had worked extensively with the studio to produce an acceptable shooting script from what they saw as morally difficult material about an adulterous affair. Yet when the studio presented the final film for approval it was rejected immediately not because the studio had handled the controversial adultery material inappropriately but rather because of ‘scenes in the maternity hospital which show the doctor lifting forth the new-born baby, and holding it in the air’.Footnote ⁵³

The film's producer, Hal Wallis, argued that the scene was acceptable because ‘the audience does not see the actual outward movement of the child from its mother's womb’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Breen pointed to the realism of the scene as his reason for considering it to be an overt depiction of childbirth: ‘These scenes are so graphically presented that you almost feel, as you watch them, that you are actually within a few feet of a woman giving birth to a child’. For Breen, cinema was such an immersive medium that a scene shot with such ‘stark realism’ made audiences believe they were witnessing an authentic birth whether they saw the baby leave the womb or not. In the end the PCA allowed the scene to be kept if the studio edited it to remove shots of the doctor lifting the newborn in the air; a now standard, almost cliché, trope in depicting childbirth.

Despite the PCA's segregation of films featuring childbirth as ‘educational’, some filmmakers still tried to get films featuring childbirth into mainstream theatres by calling them ‘semi-documentaries’. The producers of Forgotten Village originally tried to get PCA approval for their childbirth scene by arguing that the film, despite being fictional, was educational and ‘documentary in style’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The distributors of the French film The Case of Dr. Laurent (1957) were equally unsuccessful when they tried using this same rationale. The film concerned a supposedly scientifically proven method of ‘natural’ childbirth that did not require anesthesia (Figure 1).Footnote ⁵⁶ The PCA rejected The Case of Dr. Laurent because of its ‘detailed, prolonged, and full-length view of an actual childbirth’, as well as its overly clinical discussions of reproduction because they violate the Production Code's prohibition of ‘sex hygiene’.Footnote ⁵⁷ They made this decision despite the fact that, according to the PCA's new director, Geoffrey Shurlock, the staff found the film inspiring:

Ultimately, the PCA refused the film a certificate as a matter of policy. The Production Code forbade depictions of childbirth. There were no exceptions, no matter how sensitively the film treated the topic.

Figure 1.

Front cover of a promotional photobook accompanying the film The Case of Dr. Laurent (1957). © 1958 by Ben Alder Advertising Service, Inc.

The PCA's decision, however, contrasted with the judgement of the Legion of Decency, who commended the film for its ‘educational value’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Catholic Church approved of ‘natural childbirth’ as a means of removing pain from the birthing process.Footnote ⁶⁰ The film's message also appealed to the Church because it showed ‘that childbirth need not be frightful or frightening’.Footnote ⁶¹ The film had also received highly favorable reviews in prominent newspapers. These positive responses caused the current PCA director, Geoffrey Shurlock, to reassess the PCA's decision, ‘The more I think over the Dr. Laurent situation, and consider the favorable reviews the picture has received, with specific commendation of the treatment of the birth scene, the more I am convinced that we goofed in rejecting it’.Footnote ⁶² Not only did he think they should reconsider this film, but he also thought it was time that the PCA re-evaluated their entire policy concerning pregnancy and childbirth.

For one thing, Shurlock and his censors could not come to an agreement as to what the term ‘sex hygiene’ actually referred to. This was a problem given that they had used the term over the previous thirty-eight years as the means by which to determine the appropriateness of a wide variety of subjects, including pregnancy.Footnote ⁶³ In addition, Shurlock pointed out that the Production Code only required that they be handled ‘with discretion and restraint and within the careful limits of good taste’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Previously, the PCA interpreted this wording to mean that movies should never show childbirth. However, this particular film's overwhelmingly positive reception forced him to wonder if their previous interpretation was wrong. He now believed that they should allow scenes of childbirth as long as they were done in good taste. In the end Shurlock decided to reverse his decision on The Case of Dr. Laurent and grant the film a PCA seal of approval.Footnote ⁶⁵ Shurlock's reassessment of the PCA's policy on pregnancy and childbirth and the Legion of Decency's approval of the film ultimately resulted in a less restrictive approach to these topics by both organizations with films produced after 1958.

Ambiguity and abortion

Regulating depictions of pregnancy and childbirth was important to the PCA and the Legion of Decency because they wanted to preserve perceptions of motherhood as a celebratory act.

Abortion, on the other hand, was an overt rejection of motherhood. Therefore it was the one aspect of post-conception human reproduction that these censorship organizations prevented from reaching screens in any form.

Abortion was not included as part of the original Production Code in 1930 and did not appear explicitly in the document until 1951; until then the subject was not technically prohibited for inclusion in motion pictures.Footnote ⁶⁶ They did not include abortion in the Production Code because they believed that studios tacitly understood that this topic was forbidden.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Breen pointed out to one studio who argued that their story should be approved because abortion was not mentioned in the Production Code, ‘We have taken the stand that this one subject, which while not specifically mentioned in the Code, is not suited for screen dramatization, before mixed audiences, in theatres’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This long-standing ban on the subject did not, however, prevent studios from attempting to incorporate abortion narratives into their scripts.

The PCA's severe stance meant that from 1934 until the early 1950s abortion was not mentioned in films. But in the pre-Code era between 1930 and 1934 studios were often able to perform narrative gymnastics in order to tell some semblance of the story they wanted to tell about abortion. The Production Code's conventions allowed for what film scholar Ruth Vasey calls the ‘principle of deniability’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As her husband, film historian Richard Maltby, explains, the Production Code ‘permitted producers to deny responsibility for a movie's content, through a particular kind of ambiguity, a textual indeterminacy that shifted the responsibility for determining what the movie's content was away from the producers to the individual spectator’.Footnote ⁷⁰ There were a substantial number of films incorporating abortion storylines before the formation of the PCA in 1934. But abortion-based films of the pre-Code period were not straightforward narratives about the topic. These films relied on veiled language and ambiguous scenes. This ambiguity prevented the censors from removing these storylines because they could not prove that they were explicitly about abortion. But long-standing narrative codes and conventions made it clear to mature audiences what the stories were about.Footnote ⁷¹ For the SRC it became a Sisyphean battle trying to control the ambiguity in these stories so that they could not easily be read as narratives about abortion.

The negotiations between Warner Brothers and the SRC about the script for 1931's Alias the Doctor demonstrate how the censors’ attempts to control the ambiguity in these stories were doomed to fail. The original script involved a playboy medical student named Stephan performing an unspecified operation on his girlfriend before he had his medical degree. The girl dies from the botched operation and his foster brother decides to protect him by taking the blame for the operation. The SRC found the initial script problematic because, from their perspective, ‘there would be no possibility of misunderstanding the nature of the operation proposed in Alias the Doctor’ as anything other than an illegal abortion.Footnote ⁷² Because the details of the operation were unclear, producer Daryl Zanuck claimed that he was ‘amazed and bewildered’ that the censors considered the operation to be an abortion.Footnote ⁷³ Zanuck disingenuously stated that the only way the SRC could find an abortion in the text was if they ‘read it into the script’ themselves. The SRC was reading an abortion into the script, but their reading was based on their knowledge of how studios frequently used veiled language to bypass censorship restrictions. From their perspective there was ‘no other possible interpretation’ despite the ambiguity of the dialogue.Footnote ⁷⁴

To remove any ambiguity from the situation Zanuck agreed to provide a specific cause for the operation. In the revised script the two lovers argue and Stephan pushes his girlfriend down the stairs. For Zanuck this removed any possible way to read an abortion into the scene:

The studio's inclusion of a specific non-abortion operation led the SRC to believe that it had won its battle with narrative ambiguity. The censors were satisfied that ‘the dangerous element has been taken care of’ and that the film's operation ‘isn't an abortion now and couldn't possibly be considered such’.Footnote ⁷⁶ But no matter how much the SRC tried to remove ambiguity from this film, contemporary audiences’ familiarity with these narratives would lead them to see the operation as a failed abortion. Well-worn narrative codes implied that Stephan's explanation about pushing the girlfriend down the stairs was merely his attempt to conceal an illegal abortion.Footnote ⁷⁷

The SRC's weak attempt to eliminate ambiguity from cinematic abortion narratives played a role in the organization's dissolution in 1934 and its replacement by the PCA. Men in White (1934) was based on a controversial play whose plot relied heavily on abortion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although there were no overt references to abortion in the original script, the SRC found the story to be in violation of the Production Code because it contained the ‘definite suggestion that Barbara's illness is brought about by an attempt at abortion’.Footnote ⁷⁹ As with Alias the Doctor, the SRC suggested that the studio overcome this ‘definite suggestion’ by including a specific non-abortion reason for Barbara's surgery, like a failed suicide attempt. The studio rejected the SRC's suggestions to specify the character's illness because ambiguity worked in their favour. They believed that most audiences would interpret the story as being about abortion, and the abortion storyline is what had made the play incredibly popular. Ultimately, the SRC gave their tentative approval to a negotiated final script but they insisted on seeing the filmed version before they would clear the picture.Footnote ⁸⁰

The SRC identified several lines of dialogue in the filmed version that they felt strongly insinuated an abortion. Although abortion is not mentioned in a doctor's line – ‘Some of our laws are hard to understand at times they work cruel hardships but they are laws, and reputable doctors and hospitals obey them’ – it would have been clear to audiences in 1934 which laws the doctor was referring to. Hence the SRC had the studio cut the line from all existing film prints.Footnote ⁸¹ The studio balked, however, at the SRC's insistence that they remove the word ‘peritonitis’ from the film. The studio argued that that the word was just a generic medical term for an inflammation of abdominal tissue resulting from any number of causes. For the SRC, however, that term unquestionably signified a botched abortion and so it had to be removed.Footnote ⁸²

According to Will Hays the SRC's goal was to eliminate any ‘definite suggestion of abortion’ from the film. To that end he felt that most audiences would not read the edited film's ambiguous dialogue as a story about abortion:

Nonetheless, ‘a storm of protest broke out’ at the time of the picture's release amongst moral reformers and religious groups. Men in White was one of the first films condemned by the newly formed Legion of Decency.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was also central in religious protestors’ arguments about the need for a more effective Hollywood self-censorship organization, which eventually led to the formation of the PCA. Years of veiled abortion films had primed audiences in 1934 to see any story of an illicit love affair followed by a dangerous illness as indicative of an abortion.

For all the unmistakably coded situations, imagery and dialogue that still remained in the heavily censored film, the SRC would have been just as successful in controlling the film's message had they just allowed the studio to tell a straightforward abortion narrative. Film scholar Heather MacGibbon argues, in fact, that the SRC's approach of glossing over the specifics surrounding abortion was more harmful because it traumatized viewers by mystifying the unknown: ‘Without representation the audience imagines the worst possible evil, just as in many horror films where the monster is not seen directly because the imagination created a monster even more frightening than special effects could at the time.’Footnote ⁸⁵ As useful as open stories might be in demystifying abortion, the vitriolic response to Men in White demonstrated how strongly opposed religious groups were to any inclusion of abortion in motion pictures. The SRC's lenient policy of massaging scripts to remove ‘definite suggestions’ of abortion became the PCA's strict policy ‘not to allow any suggestion of abortion or even any discussion with regard to it’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Using ambiguity to tell a story about abortion was no longer possible under the PCA.

One studio was able to include an overt representation of an abortion during this period because the PCA convinced itself that a self-induced miscarriage was not an abortion. The story of Leave Her to Heaven (1945) included the pregnancy of a possessive woman named Ellen. Ellen comes to despise her unborn baby and she decides to induce a miscarriage by intentionally falling down the stairs. Her original motivation for inducing the miscarriage was because she was concerned that the unborn child was deformed.Footnote ⁸⁷ The PCA told the studio to change this motivation in order to ‘avoid any flavor that is normally connected with what could be termed “abortion”.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The studio then changed Ellen's motivation to a concern that the pregnancy had made her unattractive to her husband. But as with the previous script the PCA felt that this particular motivation gave the self-induced miscarriage the ‘flavor of abortion’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Breen suggested that this difficulty could be avoided if they ‘established that her reason for murdering the child is that she thinks that the newborn will replace her husband's affections [for her]’.Footnote ⁹⁰

In this case the PCA are making a fascinating distinction between what constitutes an abortion and what constitutes a murder. They seem to be implying that it is an abortion if the woman's motivation for inducing a miscarriage is based upon the mere fact of being pregnant (for instance, the possibility of a deformed child or the physical changes associated with pregnancy). But if her motivation involved a particular individual that she felt had wronged her, in this case the unborn child whom she believed was stealing her husband's love, then the PCA considered it murder because she is killing a specific ‘person’. Regardless of their reasoning, their subtle distinction reveals the lengths they went to to remove any suggestion of abortion from cinematic narratives. After the Men in White uproar they would not allow any narrative uncertainty that audiences might interpret as an abortion. But if the PCA convinced itself that this was unambiguously a murder, not an abortion, then they could deal with the story the same way they treated any murder. By reclassifying her actions as murder, then, the story became acceptable because the murderer received a suitable punishment for her crime.Footnote ⁹¹

By the late 1940s, however, the PCA's blanket prohibition of stories even hinting at abortion became difficult to sustain. Moral standards had loosened during the war. The influx of returning soldiers led to a rise in the number of births out of wedlock that removed some of the stigma from abortion.Footnote ⁹² The topic began to appear in popular magazines and public discussion.Footnote ⁹³ Studios wanted to take advantage of this heightened public awareness. Several times studios argued that the PCA should allow them to produce a film because their narrative portrayed abortion in a negative light. In the case of the unproduced 1950 script Unborn the scriptwriter argued that because the film was an ‘exposition of the abortion racket’ he believed it would garner vocal backing ‘from public groups interested in this great social cancer’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Breen told him that while it might seem logical that anti-abortion groups would support cinematic stories showcasing the evils of abortion, the reality was that the writer would instead run into ‘a great deal of opposition from the various groups he thinks should be in support of it’.

The producer of The Doctor and the Girl (1949) made a similar argument to the PCA, saying that the group should approve his script because ‘the entire theme is calculated to serve as a deterrent’.Footnote ⁹⁵ While Breen agreed that the story possessed ‘all the moral values in the world’, he was steadfast in his decision not to approve this film because ‘for us to approve it in this particular picture would establish a precedent for the treatment of abortion in other films’. It was a catch-22 situation for Breen. He believed that there were morally acceptable stories about abortion, but if the PCA allowed these stories to be produced they would legitimate the topic. They would then ‘have the subject of abortion injected into fifty pictures presented for our approval’. From Breen's perspective the only appropriate cinematic story about abortion was no story.

Unfortunately for Breen, the MPAA's president, Eric Johnston, was an Episcopalian who didn't share the same views on abortion in film as the Catholic Breen.Footnote ⁹⁶ The studio appealed the PCA's decision directly to Johnston. They argued that abortion was not explicitly forbidden in the Production Code and that the topic could be rendered acceptable if the script handled it with ‘good taste’. Johnston agreed that the film's message made it an appropriate story for the screen so he insisted that Breen work out a solution with the studio. The Doctor and the Girl signalled the return of veiled dialogue in abortion narratives as Breen compromised by allowing them to refer to ‘an illegal operation’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Breen's prediction that the PCA would be inundated with stories about abortion if they approved this film turned out to be correct. Despite the vagueness of the phrase ‘illegal operation’, studios realized that the PCA had just allowed an abortion narrative on the screen.

The next script involving abortion to come across the PCA's desk was for the film Beyond the Forest (1949). The PCA decided that since The Doctor and the Girl received so little negative feedback they would employ the same strategy for concealing the film's abortion plot using veiled language, such as placing a sign on the abortionist's door referring to his services as a ‘Psychological Consultation’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In this case, however, ambiguity did not prevent a flood of hostile responses to the film, including condemnation by the Legion of Decency. The Legion's C classification had a major impact on the film's box office, which forced the studio to negotiate cuts to the film in order to be reclassified as a B. The Legion rejected any narrative uncertainty as far as abortion was concerned. One of the changes they forced on the studio was the replacement of the ambiguous ‘Psychological Consultation’ sign for an unambiguous ‘Lawyer's Office’ sign.Footnote ⁹⁹

Breen felt burned by his experience with Beyond the Forest. He resented the Legion's criticism of his judgement that the film had appropriately obscured its abortion scenario. But he was more sympathetic to the Legion's position on abortion narratives than he was to Johnston's desire for compromise with the studios. When the script for Detective Story (1951) arrived on his desk he felt justified in taking a hard-line stance; there was to be no compromise this time. He insisted that Paramount remove all references to abortion and change the illegal activity in the script from abortion to an illegal ‘baby farm’. However, Breen could no longer argue that the PCA never allowed abortion narratives. The film's director, William Wyler, wondered why the PCA approved abortion stories in two recent films but they would not allow him to produce a film that clearly demonstrated the evils of abortion.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Wyler went public with his complaints about the PCA. In an interview with the New York Times he called the Production Code old-fashioned and asked, ‘Why not discuss reality?’Footnote ¹⁰¹ But ‘reality’ was what the censors feared most in cinematic stories. Groups like the PCA and the Legion of Decency still preferred idealized mythic worlds where abortion did not need to exist. They wanted their movies to tell unambiguous stories with easily understood moral messages. That wasn't reality and societal changes slowly chipped away at the PCA's authority throughout the 1950s.