The Pittsburgh Press (April 24, 1941)
I DARE SAY —
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Wilderness ahead
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By Florence Fisher Parry
You will be seeing, presently, a motion picture which will wring your heart, and you will laugh and cry in that mixed-up way that humans have of showing deep emotion.
The story is as common as dust and the rain that comes after. It is about a man and a woman who fall in love and marry and commit all the early follies and virtues of marriage, such as living beyond their means and getting ready to have a baby. And then there’s an earthquake and there can’t be a baby after all, not ever; so later they try to adopt one, and they have an awful time, for they’re so poor and “unreliable.”
And after they do get it and go through all those early agonies, the “authorities” nearly get it back again. And then later the little girl is to take the part of an angel in a Christmas entertainment, and sing “Holy Night, Silent Night” and… and… well, that’s the kind of a story it is, and it’s called “Penny Serenade.” And please don’t miss it for quite a number of reasons, the main one being, of course, that it’s about what really happens, all over the world, on every street, in every home, at one time or another… Young married couples coping with their first baby.
Cheated
For all over the world are just such young couples in love, poor, wanting a baby, wanting just to be allowed to be together and fulfill Nature’s plan. Young men wanting to provide, young women wanting to have a baby, little children wanting to play dolls and choo-choos.
I keep thinking of the young couples all over the world. Afraid now to have babies. Desperately praying and striving to keep from having babies. In Greece, what young woman would dare want to have a baby? In England? In Egypt? Anywhere, except here, in our part of the globe? And even here the Specter is creeping close… The Fifth Horseman, under whose hoofs the unborn children of tomorrow’s generation are already dying abortive deaths… here, here in America! For shame!
Oh, it seems to me that any young couple of today, in whose hands repose the privileges of children, is betraying the generation in which they live, if they deprive the future of any part of the posterity it so greatly needs. Of course, it is human to dread to bring children into such an uncertain world as this will be for the next several generations. But the dread must be faced down. And met. In direct ratio to the desperation of the future is the call upon us to PERPETUATE ourselves! This of course is the greatest argument Mr. Hoover could possibly use in his call upon us to save those doomed to starvation. Whatever in the human soul that urges liberty, must be kept alive – and if not in our children, in whom, then?
Leonidas knew it as he stood at Thermopylae, hi three hundred chosen men all FATHERS OF CHILDREN – so they could face their doom knowing that their death was NOT death, but life deferred.
Now we are reading how the Nazi hordes are pushing the Greeks and the British into the Aegean Sea; and they will be destroyed, perhaps, and the Empire may go down. Yes, we are faced with it at last; these barbarians may win. And if there, where else? FOR THEY PROPAGATE THEIR KIND. And breeding them, “condition” them to be robots of destruction and oppression.
The waiting hosts
These Nazi youths, they tell us, are still in their teens, most of them. They have known nothing but the training to kill and conquer. They know no other way of life. When the war is over, they will have passed their formative years. The mold will have congealed. There will be peace, but they will not have been conditioned to peace, they will remain potential WARRIORS, a menace 'till they die, a half a century hence. And theirs. And theirs. For how long will it take to BREED OUT such a race? When they are overrunning, now, the earth? Or shall they absorb and make theirs, for all time, our own diminishing blood?
Pondering this, what young American couple dares repudiate the obligation of having children? That is, if there’s a way at all; and usually there is. Certainly in America, where the likelihood of violent separations is still remote? It is unlikely that many young men who have families will go to war even if it comes. Most of them will be surer if jobs than they have ever been. Taxes, of course, will be their first excuse not to have children shared by all is not so onerous.
Indeed, we are fast coming into an altogether new concept of living – our standards are alrweady shifting, and what was a necessity yesterday is even now a luxury. But these are arbitrary and extraneous things, and unrelated to the simple functions that make the world go 'round. In peace or in war, anything that interferes with the process of propagation is unnatural and ought to be discouraged.
Yes, more bornings. Yes, more adoptions. Yes, more normal young homes. That is the most important item in our program to defeat the Nazis. One wanted baby will be worth more to America in 20 years than anything else his parents can do to help defend America. One adopted orphan out of Europe will do more toward her reconstruction than any single sum. There should not be, in America, one childless couple that is so, through selfish choice.