Race Suicide

N.p. Willis Kent Productions, Circa 1938. Vintage one sheet poster for the 1938 film.

An early exploitation film masquerading as an educational exposé of the medical underground, about a district attorney who becomes hell-bent on taking down an overzealous doctor who is pressuring young women into procuring illegal abortions. "Race suicide" was an alarmist term used in eugenics rhetoric in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and referred to the supposed birth rate differential between "desirable" (i.e., white, wealthy, educated, Protestant) and "undesirable" (religious and racial minorities, poor, uneducated, immigrant, criminal) populations, with the former under threat of becoming extinct as a result of overpopulation by the latter. A disturbing and fascinating document of the intersection of the eugenics and anti-abortion movements of the 1930s.

27 x 41 inches. Linen backed and rolled. Near Fine.

[Book #155557]