Jenny and the Soldier

It is especially striking, for an American viewer, to see a drama made in Denmark in the mid 1940s that discusses abortion so openly as one of the story's main themes, at a time when Hollywood films were not only forbidden by the puritanical Production Code to mention the word abortion but also had to be very careful about how they even suggested it.

In this complicated story in which the lives of various characters intersect (is it by chance, or is it God's hand, the dialogue asks) several points are made about abortion.

The wife of a strict prosecutor, whose trial papers on a group of patients found to have had abortions over the past few years, have been delayed, scolds him for the misery he will unfairly inflict on these women (meanwhile she is having an affair with a rising young lawyer who hypocritically tells women he impregnates to have an abortion even though he is assisting the prosecution) In the main story, a pugnacious soldier learns that the woman he has come to love has had a past which includes being one of these abortion patients,and that she is planning to kill herself.

The dramatization of these themes and characters is well done .