Word: childlessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...surface, Michael and Margaret Pritchard are a rather ordinary childless couple. He is a shy, fairly dull curator of manuscripts at the Library of Congress, apparently content with an orderly retreat from life among the works of long dead poets. She is a good-looking, sensitive, sometimes witty middle-aged woman with a crippled hand from a childhood bout with polio. She feels his passion has waned, and wants more excitement in her life. He feels caged by the demands of her love. That worm in the bud eats at their inner emotional lives. Their affectionate love slowly evolves from...
...control devices are already widely available to all but a tiny fraction of U.S. citizens. Smith declares, but -really effective population control cannot be achieved until there is a change in society's attitude toward procreation. As things now stand, social and institutional pressures tend to stigmatize the childless couple - not to mention the single person - as "abnormal." Smith concedes that such an attitude had its use in the past; it "evolved over millennia to ensure high enough fertility to overcome high mortality." Now, however, medical progress has made that notion obsolete. Smith proposes that the reform start with...
...poor, pregnant runaway stranded far from home. But 3 Into 2 Won't Go, as the title says, and the ménage à trois quickly proves insupportable. The truth is that even when it was a ménage à deux, the Howards were a loveless, childless couple. At the first signs of offspring, Howard decides to abandon his bed and board to run off with the girl. When Ella's alarm turns out false, so do the marriage, the liaison-and the poses of all the principals...
...scene is Bergman's favorite symbol: an island off the coast. There, a violinist named Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) and his wife Eva (Liv Ullman) cower in their farmhouse, waiting out a civil war that rages on the mainland. It is a truism that in many childless marriages one of the couple assumes the role of the baby. In the Rosenbergs' case, it is Jan, cosseted and petted by Eva during his incessant tantrums and irrational fears. Infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering, afflicted with a bad heart and a sick psyche, Jan lives for a chance to resume...
There are, to be sure, difficulties as well. The family allowance would still not take care of the childless poor, while the negative income tax could not really be administered, as its proponents sometimes claim, with only a small addition to the staff of the Internal Revenue Service. For one thing, money would have to be handed out monthly or weekly, a big chore that would cause rather substantial changes in the IRS bureaucracy. The negative income tax would have a further practical drawback. Middle-income workers would not benefit at all, as they would with family allowances, and they...