Simon Jarrett discusses a remarkable 1916 American film advocating euthanasia of disabled babies and starring the medical pin-up boy of the eugenics movement.
Quote: The story of the film Black Stork reminds us that debates about the right to live, or indeed the right to die, are nothing new.
Film: The Black Stork, 1916, Jack Lait with Harry Haiselden (University of Michigan Historic Health Film Collection)
In 1915, Dr Harry J Haiselden was chief surgeon at Chicago’s German-American hospital. When he was called from home to an abnormal birth at the hospital early one morning, he encountered a baby, born to Anna Bollinger, who had multiple physical abnormalities. These included absence of a neck and one ear, defects of the shoulders and chest and a prematurely bonded skull.
In Haiselden’s opinion he could operate to correct the internal physical defects, but ‘Baby Bollinger’ would remain with significant physical and mental deficits.
Hearing this, the baby’s parents agreed, with Haiselden, that there should be no life-saving operation and five days later Baby Bollinger died.
Haiselden then did something unexpected. He went on a media offensive, not only to justify his decision, but to advocate the legal euthanasia of severely disabled new-borns. He revealed that he had allowed numerous ‘defective’ babies to die during the last decade.
Over the next three years he withheld treatment from, or actively hastened the deaths of, five more babies – each time publicising what he had done to the press. They responded with blanket coverage. Sensational headlines proclaimed ‘He’s going to let her baby die; this woman says “It’s for the best”’ and asked: ‘Does humanity demand the saving of defective babies?’
God’s vision
Haiselden’s next step was even more extraordinary. With Jack Lait, a journalist he had met through the furore about his case, he made a film, based broadly on the case of Baby Bollinger, starring himself as the surgeon ‘Dr Dicky’.
In Black Stork, a man with an unnamed inherited disease marries his sweetheart, despite earnest pleas from Dr Dicky not to do so. The wife becomes pregnant and their baby is born severely disabled. The doctor refuses to perform the operation that would allow the baby to survive, but with physical and mental disabilities.
The mother is at first full of doubt but then God reveals to her a vision of the child’s wretched, tormented future, and she accepts Dr Dicky’s decision. The soul of the child jumps into the arms of a waiting Jesus.
The film came as close as it dared to proclaiming the right of the doctor to play God.
Political support
Black Stork played in mainstream American cinemas from throughout the 1920s (after 1918 it was renamed Are you fit to marry?) and was still being shown as late as 1942.
Reaction to Haiselden’s film, and his beliefs, reflected the polarisation of American opinion on eugenics. He attracted support from the political left and right, and mainstream religion. Many ‘progressives’ supported him in his quest to introduce the ‘right to die’ for severely disabled babies – they included civil rights lawyers, historians, judges, and the Catholic Cardinal of Baltimore.
Some parents voiced their support and asked him to perform euthanasia for their children. Equally there was opposition from across the political and religious spectrum, and from families.
Haiselden was never prosecuted for the killings, or ‘allowed deaths’ as they were known, despite several investigations into his conduct. He was expelled from the Chicago Medical Society, not for what he had done, but for publicising it.
The bizarre story of the film of the Black Stork, and the tragic tale of Baby Bollinger and other babies born under Haiselden’s medical regime, remind us that debates about the right to live, or indeed the right to die, are nothing new. In the febrile atmosphere of the American eugenics era, Black Stork was a film that could inspire both acclamation and revulsion.
Information for this article is drawn from: Martin S Pernick, The Black Stork: eugenics and the death of ‘defective’ babies in American medicine and motion pictures since 1915, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996
